stochastic parrot

English

Etymology

Coined by American linguist Emily M. Bender in 2021 as a reminder of the limitations of language models, see quotations.

Noun

stochastic parrot (plural stochastic parrots)

1. (machine learning, derogatory) A language model that uses artificial intelligence to generate seemingly coherent or contextually relevant text but does not truly understand the meaning of the language it is processing
   • 2021 March 3, Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Shmargaret Shmitchell, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜”, in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, ACM, →DOI, →ISBN, pages 610–623:

     […] an LM is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot.

See also

• verisimilitude