Emily Bender Sets the Record Straight on "Stochastic Parrots"
In March 2021, a group of four researchers-a collaboration of linguists and computer scientists-published their now legendary paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜" The paper received significant attention at the time (in part because Google fired two of the authors, Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, shortly before its publication). 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.
Key Takeaways
- And over the past five years, the analogy has spread well beyond the academic field where it originated, spawning debates and inspiring projects such as a shoulder-mounted robot named the Stochastic Parrot.
But that wider usage has also led to misconceptions about what the phrase originally meant.
- I contribute to that, and I also work in computational linguistics, training students who are going to go on to build language technology.
Language technology actually stands alone as valuable and interesting, independent of whether or not someone wants to use it for their project of artificial intelligence.
- I think that it makes it difficult to actually have good discussions about technology and make wise decisions about it, if the way we're talking about it doesn't make clear what the technology is.
The phrase "artificial intelligence" both groups together disparate technologies and oversells what each one of them can do.
- But then other people will say, "You can't say AI is all bad, because what about AlphaFold ?"
So, yes, for many people, they are talking about chatbots built on top of large language models, but [they're] also not really clear that those things are separate from something like AlphaFold.
- Bender: Well, there's a value to people who are trying to sell this-so too the tech companies trying to raise their valuations.
Stats & Key Facts
- #In March 2021, a group of four researchers-a collaboration of linguists and computer scientists-published their now legendary paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?
And over the past five years, the analogy has spread well beyond the academic field where it originated, spawning debates and inspiring projects such as a shoulder-mounted robot named the Stochastic Parrot. But that wider usage has also led to misconceptions about what the phrase originally meant. Bender , a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington, recently wrote a blog post to debunk common misconceptions about the paper on its five-year anniversary.
Bender spoke with IEEE Spectrum about these misconceptions, the field of computational linguistics, and the current discourse around artificial intelligence. What's Wrong With the Term "Artificial Intelligence" How would you describe your work as a computational linguist? Bender: Linguistics, very generally, is the study of how language works and how we work with language.
I contribute to that, and I also work in computational linguistics, training students who are going to go on to build language technology. Language technology actually stands alone as valuable and interesting, independent of whether or not someone wants to use it for their project of artificial intelligence. Language technology includes things like automatic transcription, machine translation, spell check.
For more details please read the original article at IEEE Spectrum AI.
Continue Learning
Comments
Comments appear only after moderation. Your email identifies your submission to the moderator and is never displayed here.
No approved comments yet.