What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

Five years on, which term do we see as less accurate to describe LLMs? Artificial Intelligence or Stochastic Parrot? I guess it's still an open debate.

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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 past that stage of development.

> 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 it to focus on other things. I'm glad to hear "stochastic parrot" isn't intended as an insult, and I agree that it's not right to think of LLMs as a box with a little homunculus inside replying to you. 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.

Though, I would point out that where people fall on that seems to correlate very highly with their ability to explain how an attention head works.