Moira Gunn hosted a linguistics professor called Dr. Emily Bender on her podcast Tech Nation. Bender had released a book with Dr. Alex Hannah, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want.
My interest was piqued when they mentioned a 2021 paper by Bender, et. al., on language models called Stochastic Parrot.
As one of the thinkers attempting some common sense to cut through the AI hype, I love that term. Much of generative AI and large language models are simply probability calculations based on learned text. In other words:
Stochastic—a random probability distribution that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely—plus Parrot—to repeat something said by someone else without thought or understanding.
There are writers on both sides of the hype divide—the doom sayers and the optimistic hype sayers—who have let imagination run amok. Shall we pull back a little and look for those applications where this will really help. Applications other than providing more words for marketers to stuff into a news release, that is.
