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What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

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Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#31

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

scarmig wrote: post #17
noduerme wrote: post #2

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.

Which frame inspires a more productive research program? Which has better predicted the trajectory of capabilities over the past five years?

There seems to be some confusion between "we can" and "we should" in your comment. Bender (and others) are not discussing the capabilities, but rather (a) the fundamental mechanism(s) (b) the advisability and desirability of deploying systems that use these mechanisms.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#32

Post by Diogenesian »

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 properly understand concepts like "four."

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#34

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

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…

> most humans are stochastic parrots

There's a lot more happening behind the scenes when a human repeats phrases than what's happening in an LLM.

Sociological phenomenon. The desire to be liked, successful, or popular. The feeling that those phrases brings up.

LLMs are not experiencing any of that. As far as we know, neither is a parrot.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#35

Post by fxwin »

noduerme wrote: post #2

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.

I think "(intelligent) language understander" is an apt term. It contains within it the fact that these models are mainly trained on text, and "understand" it beyond a simple token-by-token level (i.e. their latent space maps to more and more complex concepts).

It also separates them from "world understanders" since any understanding they might have about the world comes from text (or images if we include multimodal models). They do not gather experience, memories or other "qualia" that many people (me included) would probably include in a definition of human experience/intelligence.

(fwiw i think artificial intelligence is a good, broad term, but it is both too broad to describe the current sota, and too loaded nowadays to be using in nuanced discussions)

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#36

Post by snapcaster »

beardedwizard wrote: post #19
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs do not match patterns. They predict one statistically most likely token (only one!) given a history of some N previously known tokens.

Is that prediction not based on matching previous patterns, whose frequencies are more or less encoded in the weights?

you're really reaching for no apparent reason. Just move on from pattern matching machines it's not a good mental model for LLMs

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#37

Post by dwa3592 »

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 actually read the paper then please list a few criticisms. all i have seen is "oh this wasn't that good of a paper" or "can't believe how bad this paper was".

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#38

Post by paulcole »

noduerme wrote: post #2

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.

> Stochastic Parrot

Nearly all (99%+) people who use this phrase are anti-AI and just looking to show off how much they dislike AI and how clever they can be in insulting it.

So it's a great phrase because in just about every case I can ignore what someone says afterwards.

Similar to "glorified autocomplete."

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#39

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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".

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#40

Post by dekhn »

Personally, I've always read that paper as a political criticism of industry and industrialized research and capitalism. After decades in academic (and industrialized research) I've learned that smart people can write convincing takedowns of things they hate- and those takedowns, due to being well written, often punch above their weight in terms of impact on the community.

I think this paper would have been best split off from the conjoined criticism of environmental effects (which could have been its own paper, but not one published by Google, since their leadership's fundamental beliefs disagree with the paper's environmental impact premise. And the remaining part on text models could have been a bit more focused on the technical issues associated with statistical text processing and meaning, rather than criticism of the power structure that is loosely associated with the current AI push.

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