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What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

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Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#131

Post by breppp »

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…

[flagged]

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#132

Post by azakai »

dwa3592 wrote: post #37

I paid a bit of attention to this paper and the phrase 'stochastic parrots' when it came out and i thought this was worth saying and doing at that time. their suggestions about financial and environmental costs are worth studying, their concern about carefully evaluating datasets to feed to the model rather than feeding the entire internet is fully justified. so - to everyone saying this was a bad paper; if you have…

My main criticism of the paper is that it says LLMs work "haphazardly", using probabilistic information. That is a hypothesis, but it is stated as a known fact, a fundamental limitation.

It is true that LLMs often behave haphazardly, and do rely on statistics. But plenty of research has shown them behaving in methodical ways too. There are findings going both ways!

Granted, many of the strongest contradictory results appeared after the Stochastic Parrots paper, so it isn't like they were ignoring the literature at the time. But they did make a very strong claim, and in the half-decade since, a lot of evidence has come out against it.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#133

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

andrewla wrote: post #95
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how language works https://www.telelib.com/authors/J/JoyceJames/prose/finnegans...

I dunno, man, I looked at that text and I see one word after another. Obviously language and the connection to human thought is more subtle than this; I think we all have a rich inner life. Just from an external perspective we can't observe it; all we can see is the token/phoneme stream. I'm just saying that it's a mistake to try to criticize LLMs on this basis because it's hard to see how the same criticism would no…

If you want to see words form a shape I could point you towards concrete poetry, but I guess there is no point. Joyce wrote Finnegan’s Wake for 17 years and although superficially it seems complete gibberish, trodding through it you find meaning to words that are in no dictionary, sentence structures alien to English, etc. but still you are able to understand it, and perhaps some way the mind that produced it. So I disagree with you, we can observe each other’s inner life. It is always unexpected, strange, exciting, but always rooted to our shared experience or what it like being a very big and confused ape.

LLM’s are usually unexpected only when they malfunction and sprout same letter again and again etc - hardly a literary masterpiece. They make very easily recognisable patterns that we can use as helpful tools, but in the end they are devoid of any meaning apart from what we give them. Of course one could say same about art and all language, but I think there still is the fact that we apes somehow recognise each other. And besides, we do know the internal functions that drive the parroting. It is admittedly bit tricky, but in no way as magical as people purport it to be.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#134

Post by rdedev »

agentultra wrote: post #129
scarmig wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Breaking it down this way is a great way to minimize the numbers so that it appears reasonable. See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them! They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes. The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many…

Putting things into perspective is not minimising the problem. We literally have to do this to prioritise where our efforts can be useful.

Your argument makes sense if ai datacenters were using something close to like alfafa farming but the difference between them is soo massive it does not make sense.

Reducing pollution is a much better problem to fight for

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#135

Post by simonw »

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

This is a useful piece on that: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#136

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

naasking wrote: post #113
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I prefer to work the other way around. That is, accept that a lot of human speech (and text) is generated via similar mechanisms to the ones that drive LLMs, but note that there is another kind of behavior - reasoning - which seems to be distinct.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#137

Post by shimman »

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.

Nice false dichotomy you got there there, might as well calculate the entire water usage for a a single GPU in the supply chain too. Something tells me one is extremely worse than the other when you account for all the water that's used in a single supply chain for high end electronics, but if you want to plop the measuring stick where ever along the whole pony show that makes you look better people will notice.

Also to compare growing food with the totally optional, not useful in the slightest, LLMs that somehow demand local populaces bend to their will for reasons that never seem to benefit them is just bonkers level of self-blinding when it comes to populations absolutely despising big tech, big tech leadership, and big tech practices.

This mania might finally cause the software industry to become a highly regulated with licenses similar to that of other engineering disciplines due to amount of optional destruction they have decided to unleash upon on the planet in such a short time frame.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#138

Post by matusp »

dwa3592 wrote: post #37

I paid a bit of attention to this paper and the phrase 'stochastic parrots' when it came out and i thought this was worth saying and doing at that time. their suggestions about financial and environmental costs are worth studying, their concern about carefully evaluating datasets to feed to the model rather than feeding the entire internet is fully justified. so - to everyone saying this was a bad paper; if you have…

It is a good blog, not a good paper.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#139

Post by thomastjeffery »

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.

How can you articulate a criticism without a repetition of your criticism becoming "inherently pejorative"?

You can't. That's just the way the news goes.

Essentially, what you are saying is that because some people somewhere frame a statement as pejorative, the statement itself is inherently pejorative. By that logic, every criticism ever articulated is inherently an insult.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#140

Post by arthurjj »

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

I like this summary https://www.andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fak...

And this is a reply to her comment about water usage where it becomes clear she's not arguing in good faith. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1990498830131888173

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