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What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

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Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#71

Post by AlexandrB »

NyxWulf wrote: post #47

After having used LLMs for some time now, I don't agree with the concept they are just token generators, unless you think that's all humans are too. The way we test in most schools is just picking the right token. We also give them unique problems that they never saw in their training, which is the nature of programming. I realize they are probabilistic token generator models, but I find it harder and harder to accep…

Here's the thing: most things people do does not involve tokens of any kind. It is, in fact, stuff that not easily describable. For example, it's trivial for a person to walk, but they cannot verbally describe what muscles they're activating in what order to make that happen.

Cognitive skills such as tool use and complex navigation predate language as well. That means there's a core of reasoning in humans that doesn't depend on "tokens" or "language" of any kind. Language is a tool for communication and forming complex human societies, but it's not cognition.

> The thing is a parrot just says things it has already heard, it doesn't perform complex reasoning on novel situations and then explain it succinctly.

Well a parrot does perform complex reasoning on novel situations all the time. It just doesn't have the wiring to connect that to "tokenized" human language. I suspect LLMs have the opposite problem, where they exist in the domain of their "tokens" and have no way to connect these to truly novel situations that have no existing words to describe them.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#72

Post by magicmicah85 »

wolttam wrote: post #45

I'm sorry but I do tend to feel like this muddies up the discussion on "what this technology really is". I think "artificial" is actually a pretty good term to describe the output of the models. That output does appear to resemble at least some definition of the word "intelligence" - there is some ability there to do cognition over information that's been provided to them in-context. What is it to understand, then? I…

Large language model is the term for what most people call "artificial intelligence". Bender's point is that labeling everything as artificial intelligence makes it more difficult to get funded or to regulate the technology. It's like walking into a car and being enamored by all the technology and saying "It's all computer". Yes, it's computers but that is not an accurate description of the many technologies inside that car.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#73

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

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.

This is a false dichotomy. Artificial Intelligence is more of a marketing term type of Hi-Fi or High Definition, ie. being a “suitcase word”[1], ie. it packs various different meanings and phenomena together to the point that without explication one cannot know what we are even talking about. Content recommendation system and LLM are completely different things.

What professor Bender is trying to explain here is that they were trying to describe how the LLM’s actually operate, to which point stochastic parrots is a fairly decent term. It is only disparaging if you know absolutely nothing how LLM’s work or you have some strange affixation to chatbots and believing they are far more capable than they actually are.

[1] Coined by Marvin Minsky: https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/consciousness-is-a-big-su...

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#74

Post by rob74 »

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…

It's also a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: if they were raised by their parents like all other more intelligent animals, they wouldn't need to be as intelligent as they are in order to be able to relearn "octopus behaviour" without help from other members of the species.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#75

Post by tsimionescu »

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…

This is a complete misunderstanding of how even idiots function in the real world. There is a lot of thinking that goes into living a human (or even animal) life that models are nowhere near ready to model yet. Even ignoring the physical interaction side, the way any human sets and achieves long term goals (such as getting and maintaining a job), interacting with the huge amount of systems present in day to day life, and learning new tools along the way for decades is far beyond the current abilities of these models - even if they handily beat 90-100% of humanity on some tasks normally considered much harder.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#76

Post by scarmig »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #31
scarmig wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no statement one way or another about should in my comment; and, for what it's worth, my ideal would be an immediate global pause in AI research and development.

But the different terms imply different mental models of what LLMs are and can do. If you take two people, one who thinks of them as "artificial intelligence" and one as "stochastic parrots" (with all the implicit context and connotations of the individual words composing them), what mental model would have led to better predictions of LLMs' future circa 2020?

The "stochastic parrots" phrase is very dangerous in that frame. People read far more into what capabilities it implies are (im)possible than the narrow technical description the authors originally argued for. If all they are is spicy autocomplete or pastiche plagiarizers, there's nothing serious to worry about. And when an opposition gets stuck in a trough that mindlessly dismisses their future capabilities out of hand because of a bad mental model, it renders them ineffective at preventing the worst outcomes.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#78

Post by magicmicah85 »

waffletower wrote: post #53

> when OpenAI imposed ChatGPT on the world... OpenAI offered ChatGPT to the world. A large, monied cross-section of the world had yet to throw its capital behind the Large Language Model technology that made the ChatBot possible. While it is fair to see AI development now as a global imposition, OpenAI did not have the agency as a 2022 startup to impose on the scale we see now.

I agree with a lot of her points but that word really is revealing of her thoughts about OpenAI.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#79

Post by TaupeRanger »

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.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#80

Post by myhf »

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…

Pressuring an employee to add unethical behavior or specific religious practices to their job description is constructive termination.

I'd say what's under debate is whether uncritical LLM adoption is mainly unethical or mainly religious.

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