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What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

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Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#111

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

27183 wrote: post #62
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…

> But to me it seems obvious that LLMs are not repeating patterns without comprehension and do understand what they are saying; otherwise they would not be capable of doing things they routinely do. Is it possible you're making the following error described in the article? > The fact that these systems are designed to mimic the way we use language makes it very easy for people to mistake them for other people. Clearl…

I'm not offended by the line of questioning! But I don't really follow it. I don't and IIUC Bender doesn't use "understanding" to refer to any kind of magical property. Understanding is the capability of using words as consistent handles to things in the exterior world which the language is describing. And this is something LLMs can clearly do. I just went to ChatGPT and asked this question, which is almost surely not in its training data:

> What would happen if I walked to the top of a skyscraper with a soda can full of Maraschino cherries and let them go?

And its answer (https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a4bd9ffa5708191901bb6d43c89f43b) clearly demonstrates understanding. It knew that this is a dangerous thing I should not do in real life, and that my question is ambiguous about whether I intend to drop the can, and that this might be intended as a physics problem rather than a real life scenario.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#112

Post by dekhn »

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.

There's plenty of beautiful math there, but the relationship to what our neocortex does is pretty distant. Individual biological neurons can do fairly complicated things, including compute 10-bit parity functions (you would normally need a 3-layer MLP with a bunch of digital neurons to do this). And they don't seem to use backpropagation for learning.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#113

Post by naasking »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #39
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…

> But to me it seems obvious that LLMs are not repeating patterns without comprehension and do understand what they are saying; otherwise they would not be capable of doing things they routinely do. So this seems obvious to you, and yet to many others, it is equally obvious that LLMs can/could do the things they routinely do without any meaningful sense of "understanding".

I think it's a mistake to disentangle their abilities from understanding. Just swallow the pill that they have some form of understanding, even if it slightly differs from ours. I really don't see the problem.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#114

Post by softwaredoug »

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?

The "stochastic" is the key modifier to "parrot".

> "Stochastic" means having a random pattern or variable that can be analyzed statistically but not predicted precisely

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#115

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

naasking wrote: post #99
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because they don't just parrot, they interpolate, which is why they have such varied abilities. You can't explain the range of behaviours they have with just parroting, and once you accept that, why shouldn't this qualify as some form of intelligence?

There’s a lot of confusion here on what parrots exactly are capable of doing and assumptions how smart they are. I also don’t quite see what you mean by behaviour in respect to LLM’s, possibly “agentic” tool usage? Because I’m fairly certain you can explain their behaviour as “stochastic parroting” combined with very strong program, ie. harness, to interact with other systems. And perhaps this all is “some kind of intelligence”, but then you have to be very careful with what you mean by intelligence. It becomes a terribly slippery surface described like this and you see, who knows where this gradient descent takes us if we are not careful.

So personally I would still rather undersell it. But parrot or not, it is still a terribly useful little bird indeed.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#116

Post by dekhn »

skeledrew wrote: post #77

Doesn't really matter that much what they're called as long as they're useful, and LLMs (particularly when harnessed) are already ridiculously useful. But it also begs the question: are stochastic parrots useful?

Yes, they are. Likely due to a deep relationship between math and physics, statistical modelling of complex natural phenomena has repeatedly been shown to be the most effective approach. This is true of LLMs, but also of many stochastic (and other) systems.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#117

Post by scarmig »

NeutralCrane wrote: post #105
arthurjj wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The hysteria around water usage rests on people not knowing the scale of industrial civilization. First thing to do is compare any estimate of data center water usage with the water usage of almond farming. Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#118

Post by koverstreet »

ainch wrote: post #102
koverstreet wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's fundamental to how anything that compresses/understands the world has to work, in the Kolmogeravian sense. That's why people denigrate LLMs as being just "next token predictors" - they're not wrong, but they're missing the point.

Because to do that kind of prediction out in the world you have to build up an accurate model of reality - a model that includes yourself! Which is why we and LLMs are self aware.

For the "how", it's been known for some time that LLMs operate on a Reimannian manifold - the semantic manifold - and that's a good place to start if you want to learn how they actually work; how a Reimannian manifold (plus some extra structure on top) can represent natural language in a form you can do work with is the part I find particularly beautiful. At a high level, the neocortex and LLMs appear to compute on the manifold in basically the same way - though a lot of the details are different; both are more sophisticated in some areas and less in others.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#119

Post by wazoox »

Sharlin wrote: post #56
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #25

> With the octopus thought experiment, I initially had told the story in terms of a dolphin, because dolphins clearly are intelligent animals. My co-author on that paper, Alexander Koller, said it should be an octopus, because first of all, the environment that octopuses live in is much more distinct from where people live. It makes the metaphor more vivid, that the octopus is just feeling these pulses in the cable a…

It's such a tragedy that they're also extremely solitary animals and die shortly after reproducing the first (and only) time. Almost all other particularly intelligent animals seem to be gregarious, and it's easy to conclude that a social lifestyle tends to select for more intelligence, a sophisticated theory of mind, and so on (I like to think that that's exactly what was responsible for a runaway intelligence explo…

In Stefan Wul's SF novel "Nyourk", octopi evolve to become the Earth's dominant species, which was quite prescient back in 1957, when almost nobody knew octopi to be intelligent. :)

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#120

Post by QuercusMax »

scarmig wrote: post #117
NeutralCrane wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The hysteria around water usage rests on people not knowing the scale of industrial civilization. First thing to do is compare any estimate of data center water usage with the water usage of almond farming. Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.

Or even better: the footprint of doing something like farming corn for ethanol
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