‘Stochastic Parrot’: A Name for AI That Sounds a Bit Less Intelligent

livemint.com:

On Jan. 5, a few hundred linguists gathered in a ballroom in midtown Manhattan to mull various nominations for the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year. As chair of the society’s new words committee, I oversaw the lively colloquy, which attracted many members of the group and the larger Linguistic Society of America.

Winning words were also selected in such categories as “Most Creative" and “Political Word of the Year." And this time we added a special ad-hoc category related to one of the most buzzed-about stories of 2023: artificial intelligence. Our new category included an array of AI heavy hitters. There was “ChatGPT," the name for OpenAI’s chatbot, which is so successful it often gets used generically for any generative AI system.

There was “LLM," short for “large language model," the machine-learning algorithm trained on mountains of text that powers AI programs. And there was “hallucination," for AI-generated responses that are untethered from reality. Triumphing over all of these was “stochastic parrot," used by AI skeptics to point out that large language models are not capable of understanding language but instead have been programmed to parrot back plausible-sounding synthetic text.

The term was coined by University of Washington computational linguist Emily M. Bender in a widely cited 2021 paper. As it happened, Bender was in attendance at the Word of the Year event and spoke about how her coinage of “stochastic parrot" took off.