Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 280 posts

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#101

Post by inspectorSlap »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #79
softwaredoug wrote: post #61

I don’t see a problem with the “stochastic parrot” label. It just turns out stochastic parrots are incredibly useful. At a minimum it’s probably more accurate than “AI”.

Whether Bender intended it or not, the term has an inherently pejorative sense. "Parroting" is not really indicative of what modern LLMs do. However, when most people bring it up as a criticism of "AI in general" in 2026, they're using it as a pointer to all of the social/environmental criticisms, rather than the technological capabilities.

I think stochastic parroting is really a very accurate description of what they do (if underserving of the overall usefulness of LLMs). As long as you consider they are parroting from the whole of human intelligence. Its just that as they have gotten more sophisticated, the amount of gates, guardrails, and tertiary tools add variety. Trace any LLM hallucination back to provenance and you begin to see how the stochastic parrot works.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#102

Post by ainch »

koverstreet wrote: post #98
TaupeRanger wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether Bender intended it or not, the term has an inherently pejorative sense. "Parroting" is not really indicative of what modern LLMs do. However, when most people bring it up as a criticism of "AI in general" in 2026, they're using it as a pointer to all of the social/environmental criticisms, rather than the technological capabilities.

Yeah, there's some beautiful math underlying what LLMs are doing, and it's the same math our neocortex runs on.

Could you provide more detail? My understanding is that the neocortex is predominantly focused on forwards simulation, which seems distinct to how transformers operate.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#103

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

waffletower wrote: post #53

> when OpenAI imposed ChatGPT on the world... OpenAI offered ChatGPT to the world. A large, monied cross-section of the world had yet to throw its capital behind the Large Language Model technology that made the ChatBot possible. While it is fair to see AI development now as a global imposition, OpenAI did not have the agency as a 2022 startup to impose on the scale we see now.

> A large, monied cross-section of the world

I asked Mistral, and it guestimated that Altman, Thiel, Musk, and Hoffman had like $20.3B together when they founded it. Sound to me that the founding of OpenAI was exactly the point when the monied world threw its dollars behind AI.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#104

Post by DangitBobby »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #65
fsckboy wrote: post #27

it annoys me how eager people are to hurl the word stochastic as pejorative. Statistics are a great tool for gleaning information from stochastic processes; statistics don't contribute randomness. Random sampling is necessary in order not to bias a sample, it's not used to contribute randomness to the sample but to preserve/measure the underlying distribution. (not meant to imply that training is random sampling)

It's a pejorative only because determinism is what makes computers useful in the first place. You get a consistent result, every single time, unlike if you have a human in the loop. Because LLMs are stochastic, they have removed the thing that makes computers useful to us, thus it's a pejorative.

It turns out that determinism isn't what makes computers useful in the first place.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#105

Post by NeutralCrane »

arthurjj wrote: post #68
Aurornis wrote: post #21

> in part because Google fired two of the authors, Timnit Gebru I remember being angry about this situation when I first saw it on social media, until I read the details: This person submitted a list of demands to her employer and said that if they weren’t met, she quit. Google wasn’t going to meet her demands so they considered it acceptance of her resignation. There has been a movement trying to debate whether it w…

I think part of it is she had excellent PR skills and a dedicated fan base. I was at Google when she quit, working in ML, and hadn't heard of her until the story broke. I remember there were a large number of Memegen posts about it, but no one I spoke with knew about her, so I assumed it was brigading. I think she's since since lost a lot of her allure, especially when she didn't change her mind when the facts about…

What exactly are the facts about AI water usage? I have trouble separating hysteria from reality but most of what I see still claims water usage is enormous

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#106

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #97
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it not indicative of what LLM’s do?

Really? Are you under the impression that parrots are able to synthesize their input and create entirely new, useful outputs which they have never heard before?

Yes, I am: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#107

Post by DangitBobby »

Diogenesian wrote: post #43
jongjong wrote: post #6

The term is not very useful since most humans are stochastic parrots... At least most of the time. Not suggesting that I don't say stuff on autopilot sometimes but for many people, it's their only mode of operation. They never actually think about anything from first principles. Their whole approach to language is just chaining catchphrases together. It's how a toddler thinks; it seems like many people never moved pa…

Humans are not stochastic parrots. You are 100% wrong about toddlers. This was clearly explained by St. Augustine 1500 years ago: Did I not, then, as I grew out of infancy, come next to boyhood, or rather did it not come to me and succeed my infancy? My infancy did not go away (for where would it go?). It was simply no longer present; and I was no longer an infant who could not speak, but now a chattering boy. I reme…

FWIW nothing in this comment refutes any claims made in the comment it replies to. It's probably not the worst thing in the world for humans to start being a little more humble about themselves and their capabilities. Anthropocentrism has been a fucking disaster.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#108

Post by josh-sematic »

Diogenesian wrote: post #67
wolttam wrote: post #45

I'm sorry but I do tend to feel like this muddies up the discussion on "what this technology really is". I think "artificial" is actually a pretty good term to describe the output of the models. That output does appear to resemble at least some definition of the word "intelligence" - there is some ability there to do cognition over information that's been provided to them in-context. What is it to understand, then? I…

"Virtual intelligence" is better. Transformer ANNs are dramatically dumber than cockroaches and it doesn't make sense to describe such a system as being artificially intelligent, for the same reason it doesn't make sense to describe Half-Life: Alyx as an "artificial reality." An artificial reality implies some sort of scientific fidelity to actual reality. A virtual reality just has to be temporarily convincing. Like…

> Transformer ANNs are dramatically dumber than cockroaches

Source?

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#109

Post by naasking »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #65
fsckboy wrote: post #27

it annoys me how eager people are to hurl the word stochastic as pejorative. Statistics are a great tool for gleaning information from stochastic processes; statistics don't contribute randomness. Random sampling is necessary in order not to bias a sample, it's not used to contribute randomness to the sample but to preserve/measure the underlying distribution. (not meant to imply that training is random sampling)

It's a pejorative only because determinism is what makes computers useful in the first place. You get a consistent result, every single time, unlike if you have a human in the loop. Because LLMs are stochastic, they have removed the thing that makes computers useful to us, thus it's a pejorative.

1. Determinism is a very small subset of what makes computers useful. Non-determinism like stochasticity is literally everywhere, like random seeds.

2. LLMs are detemrinistic. They have a parameter to tune how stochastic they are.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#110

Post by throwaway7356 »

Diogenesian wrote: post #32
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #8

> It argued that large language models (LLMs) generate text by statistically predicting likely sequences of words rather than understanding what they are saying—a process the authors captured with the metaphor of a “stochastic parrot,” a system that repeats patterns without comprehension. I don't understand what we're setting the record straight on. This is the core point of dispute, and the author just blazes past i…

This is a facile point. Lisp expert systems transparently don't understand the meaning of any symbols they process, yet with enough developer elbow grease they can do all the same things an LLM can do, with much higher reliability. The fact that LLMs are less transparent than Lisp expert systems (and easier to program) is extremely bad evidence that they understand language. Especially given that AFAICT Opus does not…

> yet with enough developer elbow grease they can do all the same things an LLM can do, with much higher reliability

Where can I access such a Lisp expert system?

If I cannot because they don't exist: then they cannot do the same things an LLM can do. And of course one can assert anything and everything about what a non-existing thing could do.

Post reply on HN