| ▲ | TaupeRanger 2 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | tptacek an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| We're all going to stay fixated on what exactly a "parrot" is, but the paper doesn't rest on the definition of tropical birds: it advances a specific and detailed hypothesis about how language models don't operate with communicative intent, and in fact the meaning humans obtain from LLM output is a cognitive pattern matching illusion. Those claims have not held up at all. At this point, I think the authors are really counting on people not to read their paper. |
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| ▲ | koverstreet 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah, there's some beautiful math underlying what LLMs are doing, and it's the same math our neocortex runs on. |
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| ▲ | burnte a minute ago | parent | next [-] | | > and it's the same math our neocortex runs on. The math is based upon theories of how the brain work, but even if those theories are right, this math is a great simplification and subset of what organic brains do. | |
| ▲ | dekhn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There's plenty of beautiful math there, but the relationship to what our neocortex does is pretty distant. Individual biological neurons can do fairly complicated things, including compute 10-bit parity functions (you would normally need a 3-layer MLP with a bunch of digital neurons to do this). And they don't seem to use backpropagation for learning. | |
| ▲ | ainch an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Could you provide more detail? My understanding is that the neocortex is predominantly focused on forwards simulation, which seems distinct to how transformers operate. | | |
| ▲ | koverstreet an hour ago | parent [-] | | That's fundamental to how anything that compresses/understands the world has to work, in the Kolmogeravian sense. That's why people denigrate LLMs as being just "next token predictors" - they're not wrong, but they're missing the point. Because to do that kind of prediction out in the world you have to build up an accurate model of reality - a model that includes yourself! Which is why we and LLMs are self aware. For the "how", it's been known for some time that LLMs operate on a Reimannian manifold - the semantic manifold - and that's a good place to start if you want to learn how they actually work; how a Reimannian manifold (plus some extra structure on top) can represent natural language in a form you can do work with is the part I find particularly beautiful. At a high level, the neocortex and LLMs appear to compute on the manifold in basically the same way - though a lot of the details are different; both are more sophisticated in some areas and less in others. |
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| ▲ | inspectorSlap 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think stochastic parroting is really a very accurate description of what they do (if underserving of the overall usefulness of LLMs). As long as you consider they are parroting from the whole of human intelligence. Its just that as they have gotten more sophisticated, the amount of gates, guardrails, and tertiary tools add variety. Trace any LLM hallucination back to provenance and you begin to see how the stochastic parrot works. |
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| ▲ | thomastjeffery 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How can you articulate a criticism without a repetition of your criticism becoming "inherently pejorative"? You can't. That's just the way the news goes. Essentially, what you are saying is that because some people somewhere frame a statement as pejorative, the statement itself is inherently pejorative. By that logic, every criticism ever articulated is inherently an insult. |
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| ▲ | delis-thumbs-7e 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Why is it not indicative of what LLM’s do? |
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| ▲ | TaupeRanger 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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? | | | |
| ▲ | naasking 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | delis-thumbs-7e an hour ago | parent [-] | | There’s a lot of confusion here on what parrots exactly are capable of doing and assumptions how smart they are. I also don’t quite see what you mean by behaviour in respect to LLM’s, possibly “agentic” tool usage? Because I’m fairly certain you can explain their behaviour as “stochastic parroting” combined with very strong program, ie. harness, to interact with other systems. And perhaps this all is “some kind of intelligence”, but then you have to be very careful with what you mean by intelligence. It becomes a terribly slippery surface described like this and you see, who knows where this gradient descent takes us if we are not careful. So personally I would still rather undersell it. But parrot or not, it is still a terribly useful little bird indeed. |
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