stochastic parrot

A stochastic parrot is an entity "for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms … according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning."

In simpler terms, it's a term for chatbots such as ChatGPT whose purpose is to string together one word after the next one according to data it's been feed.

Origin

The term originates from a paper titled fas:FilePdf On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?

Upon publication, two of the co-authors (Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell) lost their jobs as co-leads of Google's Ethical AI team.

Usage

Not quite what Emily Bender had in mind. Tech exec loved it, programmers related to it, and Sam Altman (of OpenAI) called himself one. There's a sense of hypocrisy lowering your value as a human down to that so that your own project can be seen as "comparable".