Her language consistently defines LLMs in negative terms like “synthetic text extruder” but she claims she’s not trying to denigrate it. What’s missing for me are similar terms from her about how humans create sentences and thoughts. Judging by the state of the internet humans are quite capable of making shit up to argue their point (see latest Fox News apology). She talks about sycophantic AI but give me a car battery and some cables and I can train a sycophantic human (no I can’t but there are people who can). She’s pretty much a walking counter argument for her own claims.
What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
121–130 of 280 posts
Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I agree, which is why I think this species might be the start of something amazing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larger_Pacific_striped_octopus
I've never heard of these before, that's fascinating, thank you!
Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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?
My source is "none of us have ever seen a robot that can navigate unfamiliar 3D spaces as well as a cockroach." If transformers were capable of the job we would have seen a smart robot by now. But all of our robots are truly mindless compared to the simplest insects.
I will change my mind if someone demonstrates such a robot. Absent this demonstration, cockroach-level AI is still an unsolved problem. Given how ignorant and arrogant and wealthy AI researchers are, it will remain unsolved. I don't think anyone alive today will live to see a robot smarter than an ant.
Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
#124> 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…
Her demands included wanting to know the identities of anyone who wanted to comment on her paper, after she had a history of going after people publicly. That's enough right there, nobody should tolerate toxic behavior regardless of whether you agree with the politics. Meanwhile, the paper has 2 points of criticism towards AI. 1 is a bunch of carbon consumption complaints assuming NVIDIA cards with coal-fired power,…
I think this is completely misleading. If your employer asks to redact your paper because it ignores relevant research, naturally you want to know what research they are talking about and on what grounds, and also which researches reviewed the paper (probably assuming there was none, review process was used as an excuse to silence criticism, G has done it many times).
(BTW, quite bold to say input data from Reddit and 4Chan is how “normal” people speak. There is a lot of language in the training data of any model you really do not wish your application to use ever.)
Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
#125Here is what Jeff Dean said about the firing at the time: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ...
> resignation
I appeciate short letters like this that get straight to the point...
Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
#126Earlier 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. 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 no…
> And this is something LLMs can clearly do.
...
> It knew that this is a dangerous thing I should not do in real life
From the ChatGPT response you linked, all I see for sure is some matches on the following patterns:
drop $thing from skyscraper --> bad behavior
drop $thing --> physics
can of $stuff --> contents in/out of can
It also does an incredibly poor job of answering your question. It makes no attempt to explain what might actually happen. If it has been trained on the entire corpus of medical science, and it is indeed intelligent, then surely it can reference ballistics studies and give you a very detailed and thorough theory of what--exactly--injuries you might expect from a 12oz can being dropped from the height of a skyscraper. Calculating the terminal velocity and therefore the momentum of the can is trivial. Characterizing the physics of the impact on various parts of a human body is trivial. If it actually understood your request why didn't it just answer the question?
It's a rhetorical question. LLMs do not "understand". It is completely outside their capability. "Understanding" is something we impose upon their output (to loosely quote TFA). [edit] I think the most powerful evidence for a lack of any understanding whatsoever is all the stuff about the cherries being in or out of the can. Yes, cans contain things. That is not a profound observation, nor is it at all relevant to the question. If you drop an empty can off a skyscraper nothing meaningful will happen. And, no, probably dumping all the cherries out won't hurt anyone or cause a slipping hazard... It's also not particularly relevant to point out that dropping things off skyscrapers is bad behavior. But that's more forgivable from a CYA standpoint.
I believe you are projecting something that is not there onto a completely mindless stochastic process.
[another edit] I found this helpful, you may also: https://www.0xkato.xyz/how-llms-actually-work/
Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
#127I 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.
We're all going to stay fixated on what exactly a "parrot" is, but the paper doesn't rest on the definition of tropical birds: it advances a specific and detailed hypothesis about how language models don't operate with communicative intent, and in fact the meaning humans obtain from LLM output is a cognitive pattern matching illusion. Those claims have not held up at all.
At this point, I think the authors are really counting on people not to read their paper.
Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Her demands included wanting to know the identities of anyone who wanted to comment on her paper, after she had a history of going after people publicly. That's enough right there, nobody should tolerate toxic behavior regardless of whether you agree with the politics. Meanwhile, the paper has 2 points of criticism towards AI. 1 is a bunch of carbon consumption complaints assuming NVIDIA cards with coal-fired power,…
I think this is completely misleading. If your employer asks to redact your paper because it ignores relevant research, naturally you want to know what research they are talking about and on what grounds, and also which researches reviewed the paper (probably assuming there was none, review process was used as an excuse to silence criticism, G has done it many times). (BTW, quite bold to say input data from Reddit an…
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Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
#129Earlier 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.
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 data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped.
I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”
Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"
#130[dead]