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What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

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Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#91

Post by Aurornis »

utopiah wrote: post #52
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…

True but also... she wasn't a software engineer putting code in production nor a researcher working no the fundamentals of machine learning negotiating a raise. She was part of the "Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team" of what was then, and still is now, one of the corporations World wide spending the largest amount of resources precisely on using AI commercially.

I'm saying the paper itself wasn't a bombshell or even that noteworthy. The reason it got PR and continues to come up was because the authors manufactured this self-inflicted drama around it, not because it was leaking secret revelations that harmed the company.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#92

Post by andrewflnr »

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…

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

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#93

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

Diogenesian wrote: post #43
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…

Humans are not stochastic parrots. You are 100% wrong about toddlers. This was clearly explained by St. Augustine 1500 years ago: Did I not, then, as I grew out of infancy, come next to boyhood, or rather did it not come to me and succeed my infancy? My infancy did not go away (for where would it go?). It was simply no longer present; and I was no longer an infant who could not speak, but now a chattering boy. I reme…

I really appreciate the effort you put in to this post. Posts like these are what makes HN great. Thank you.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#94

Post by hedgehog »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #64
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 it shouldn't even be contentious like that. It's not a fundamental mystery how these things work. It is for the most part not a valid target for the kind of speculation you seem to want to do about it. It's not like you can be agnostic, or measured about this. It's like someone explaining a car to you, saying, "look here is where you put the fuel, here is where it ignites, where the axels are turned..." And you,…

The "magic here somewhere" in the car is in the design that reference aspects of animal anatomy (facial features, stance) and in the millions of dollars of advertising that prime the public with expectations about how they'll feel driving it, or how to see other people in the car. There's a direct connection there to packaging LLMs as chatbots, it gives them a recognizable shape and behavior that a lot of people interpret as consciousness and personality.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#95

Post by andrewla »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #83
andrewla wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least "glorified autocomplete" is technically accurate, even if vastly underestimating the capability of LLMs. It's just trying to make something very impressive sound trivial. From an external standpoint, talking to another human, it's like the other human says one word and then says the next word. That's just how language works. Humans look like "glorified autocomplete" from this perspective. I mean, looking at…

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 not apply to any system (like humans) that generate language.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#96

Post by naasking »

myhf wrote: post #80
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.

I don't see why it's those are the only two options, nor why they are even mutually exclusive.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#97

Post by TaupeRanger »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #90
TaupeRanger wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is it not indicative of what LLM’s do?

Really? Are you under the impression that parrots are able to synthesize their input and create entirely new, useful outputs which they have never heard before?

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#98

Post by koverstreet »

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.

Yeah, there's some beautiful math underlying what LLMs are doing, and it's the same math our neocortex runs on.

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#99

Post by naasking »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #90
TaupeRanger wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is it not indicative of what LLM’s do?

Because they don't just parrot, they interpolate, which is why they have such varied abilities. You can't explain the range of behaviours they have with just parroting, and once you accept that, why shouldn't this qualify as some form of intelligence?

Re: What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots"

#100

Post by xgulfie »

AlexandrB wrote: post #81
xgulfie wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parrots certainly do experience social needs

The "parrot" part of "stochastic parrot" is quite an ambiguous choice. Taken literally, it's referencing an animal that's actually quite intelligent and capable of complex, novel tasks but has no way to connect those to human language. How I've always read this though is the more literary meaning of "parrot" as "a thing that repeats words with no context". Perhaps "stochastic photocopier" would be a clearer metaphor.

Or perhaps tape recorder would reflect the linearity of the input/output strings
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