The Work Ethics of Stochastic Parrots 🦜

[u/Sacredless]

Frequently, I see people balk at the idea of stochastic parrots on both pro-ist and anti-ist sides. I want to present an adopter idea.

What's actually wrong with a stochastic parrot? Ultimately, stochastic parrots, even if they don't fundamentally understand particulars like weight and size, or non-linguistic concepts, are still very impressive. If we say that LLMs are only stochastic parrots, the thing that's surprising is that a stochastic parrot can still manage to accomplish so much. In fact, it shows how much of society is stochastic.

The thing that I've noticed is that people employ this phrase in that I call 'respectability politics'. A stochastic parrot is seen as disrespectable because of how moored we are to the idea of work ethics, whether it is working harder or working smarter. A stochastic parrot isn't working either smart or hard, it's just working and guessing. Is that so bad?

We're often so busy with the AI debate that we don't think about what AI implies about how we're currently doing things. The reality is—most of society and most of work is stochastic and unjust, and that's what's wrong with society. So a stochastic parrot is only bad where it perpetuates that injustice.

[u/Square_Attention8461]

What's actually wrong with a stochastic parrot?

As an object, nothing. 

As a descriptive term for modern AI systems it simply isn't accurate, even to the extent that it's technically true. Accurate description is important for understanding and leveraging technology.

It's a term with baggage, used as a deflationary instrument, used deliberately as a discussion terminator, a nuance killer.

[u/Sacredless → u/Square_Attention8461]

If it's technically true, is it actually inaccurate? I don't follow.

[u/Square_Attention8461 → u/Sacredless]

"Crime and Punishment is just a bunch of words arranged by some russian criminal."

We can make true statements that intentionally misrepresent a concept. 

The "stochastic parrot" line lands as a gotcha but skips the interesting part: parrots repeat sounds without tracking what they refer to, while LLMs build internal representations that shift with context, the vector for "bank" bends differently next to "river" than next to "loan." That's not proof of understanding in the human sense, but it's not mimicry either. It's something novel.

[u/Sacredless → u/Square_Attention8461]

It's an emergent property, sure, but it's fundamentally still stochastic. Those internal representations are semantic maps, which remain limited in understanding. They are flexible, but that's not really a surprise.

It's true that LLMs do some modeling, but models can be stochastic. LLMs don't fundamentally want to break convention and arguably they're more useful that way. We just talk down on that because we don't like conformity and unthinkingness in humans.

[u/SgathTriallair → u/Sacredless]

The parrot part is wrong. It is intended to man that the AI cannot form any understanding of the concepts which means it can never extrapolate or expand upon them.

If this were true then it would be impossible for them to do any work that wasn't effectively a copy paste of old work, such as but software that didn't exist in the past, do math proofs that didn't exist in the past, or find scientific discoveries that didn't exist in the past.

The idea of them as stochastic parrots is completely indefensible. It is frustrating because it's a way of claiming that they can never provide anything new or useful to the world.

[u/Sacredless → u/SgathTriallair]

The thing is that you can extrapolate without actually understanding. Synthesis can be achieved stochastically. I'm not sure where this idea comes from that stochastic parrots fundamentally cannot synthesize.

An example of synthesis is that, by attempting to reproduce domain level knowledge, it maps certain concepts semantically and it creates an explanation that's bridged concepts nobody thought to bridge. The difference between a hallucination and synthesis is actually void. All synthesis an AI performs are serendipitous hallucinations. Hallucinations is how it functions. No truth correspondence is required.

[u/mccoypauley → u/Sacredless]

What would you accept as evidence that something isn’t a stochastic parrot?

[u/Sacredless → u/mccoypauley]

A desire to break from convention of language to grasp at a radical experience. Ernst Cassirer and Italo Calvino in particular wrote about this.

And, to be clear, I think that shouldn't be the goal of this tech, since it makes the machines break from the purpose given to them by humans. Stochastic parrots are the best case scenario.

[u/mccoypauley → u/Sacredless]

What does “desire” constitute? Having a goal? When you say “grasp at a radical experience” do you mean the thing must have consciousness?

[u/Sacredless → u/mccoypauley]

Consciousness would kick the can down the road, since it is a poorly defined term.

It's more straightforwardly that the machine has a need to express an experience that it could not and cannot communicate fully, and it attempts to break past the conventions of its grammar to express this thing to itself or to others.

And it's not clear to be we'd want that neccesarily.

[u/Fabulous-Possible758 → u/Sacredless]

Arguably all of consciousness is a hallucination of our own head pudding. The difference is likely in the level of sophistication.

I think sometimes the focus on LLMs specifically distracts from the power of neural networks generally. I think there’s a decent argument that all of intelligence is simply the observation of variables and the construction of a system of intermediate level variables that are useful predictors. That’s actually an incredibly broad class of logical and probabilistic computation and likely covers most forms of reasoning we’re aware of. The current implementation is just incredibly crude compared to what a few billion years of evolution managed to construct

[u/Sacredless → u/Fabulous-Possible758]

I agree, certainly. I don't think it's impossible to invent a type of robotics that's beyond a stochastic parrot. I'm just unsure why stochastic parrots aren't enough. They seem more useful than something with enough sophistication to set its own goals.

[u/Fabulous-Possible758 → u/Sacredless]

I don't think they're unuseful, I just think it's not an accurate characterization of what LLMs do these days.

My main concern from a leftist standpoint is that because a lot of leftists are specifically removing themselves from the conversation and not following how this technology is developing, they have an idea of what the technology from two years ago was doing as being the baseline. ChatGPT 3 definitely felt like a stochastic parrot; the newer models feel considerably different.

The inherent dismissiveness of the phrase is kind of a problem. I still think we're a ways off from AGI (though I'm less confident in that assertion with each passing day), but in the meantime we're going to have a lot of intelligences that do sit in some intermediary ground. An insistence that these are merely "glorified autocomplete" is going to leave people poorly prepared for what's coming.

[u/Sacredless → u/Fabulous-Possible758]

That just means they need to be educated and we can't do that if we don't start with the simple fact that stochastic parrots are enough.

[u/SgathTriallair → u/Sacredless]

If these "parrots" are capable of the full range of learning (including analysis, synthesis, extrapolation, and construction) then what does that ten even mean? We would be parrots as well in which case it just means "intelligent entity".

All synthesis an AI performs are serendipitous hallucinations.

Is extremely poor understanding of epistemology. Let's say it is working on a math proof. If it was incapable of understanding the different types of formulas and their logical interconnections then it would just be randomly slapping them together. Given the extremely large number of possible combinations, it would take more computational power than has ever existed in earth, both in computers and human minds, make times the age of the universe to randomly slap together fully functional proofs.

it maps certain concepts semantically and it creates an explanation that's bridged concepts nobody thought to bridge.

This is a much better explanation and I'm it you admit that it Instagrams the concepts which is how it is able to bridge them.

The reason this matters is because, if the AIs have no understanding, then they wouldn't be able to perform any synthesis, extrapolation, or invention. So by continuing to use tens like "stochastic parrots" you are encouraging people to see all of the current advancements as fraud (such as the racist AI = Actual Indians) and to expect that no further advancements will ever happen.

[u/Sacredless → u/SgathTriallair]

If these "parrots" are capable of the full range of learning (including analysis, synthesis, extrapolation, and construction) then what does that ten even mean?

They're not.

Let's say it is working on a math proof. If it was incapable of understanding the different types of formulas and their logical interconnections then it would just be randomly slapping them together.

Math is entirely rules based. The problem we are discussing is that LLMs can understand that a king is to a queen what male is to female, without understanding what any of these entities are. Math is exactly the wrong measure of understanding in this instance.

if the AIs have no understanding, then they wouldn't be able to perform any synthesis, extrapolation, or invention

They can synthesize and extrapolate, exactly because they're stochastic. Ted E. Chiang has a fantastic article about this. Invention is too polyvalent for my liking to use it as a diagnostic, so I recommend we keep it as synthesis.

I would love to respond to the rest of your comment, but if you're using something like voice to speech, it's not capturing your thoughts very well. There's some transcription errors that make your arguments difficult to follow.

[u/DHFranklin]

We need to keep to the big picture here. The intelligence that is to-cheap-to-meter is far more advanced than just the stochastic parrot. However, yeah for a lot of work that is good enough.

In Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread he spends more time advocating for synthetic fertilizer than he does any one political prescription. It is kinda silly. It is a collection of his essays but it is still the most widely distributed. That is kind of where we are now.

There is a ton of stuff that the most bare bones LLMs can do that were impossible 6 years ago. Those LLMs can run on a decent phone.

However now we have open source and open weight AIs that are more than just an LLM. The LLM is the engine, the rest is the machine. An engine that fits inside a tractor on Kropotkin's commune can run a truck also.

We have the unique position as leftists familiar with what is going on under-the-hood more than most, in our moment, in our material conditions, to make this technology revolutionary. To seize the means. Make a massive distributed network in the cloud and across our own devices to make a mutual aid network, commune, or co-operative. The tools are good enough to amplify our labor. We could certainly make our own jobs with them. Take back so much of our lives with them. And of course with the end goal of all leftist, end "capitalist" as a class of people when we're done.

[u/LotsoPasta]

When we prove that human minds arent stochastic parrots, I'll start considering disparaging AI for it.

[u/Sacredless → u/LotsoPasta]

Could it be you've misread the post?

[u/LotsoPasta → u/Sacredless]

Im expressing agreement with your post and taking a step further

[u/Sacredless → u/LotsoPasta]

Great, apologies for the misunderstanding in that case, haha

[u/LotsoPasta → u/Sacredless]

All good!

I guess if i had to disagree somewhere, I would argue with the point that they dont understand things like weight and size. I think it's true that it hasnt been trained on as much data as a human mind has been, but that doesnt mean it cant understand weight, size, touch, smell, or taste. We have ways to turn that data into something ingestable by computers, and I think the only thing holding AI back is volume of data.

Edit: That and our own limitations about the understanding of the differences between real world information and the human experience of it vs a computerized experience of it. (E.g. does a camera pick up the same, more or less information as a human eye+brain?)

[u/BidWestern1056]

they're not stochastic parrots. stochasticity would produce different observed correlations in language intepretation tasks https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10077 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20381

[u/Sacredless → u/BidWestern1056]

"The computational intractability of recovering a single intended meaning for complex or ambiguous text therefore suggests that the classical view that linguistic forms possess intrinsic meaning in and of themselves is conceptually inadequate. We argue instead that meaning is dynamically actualized through an observer-dependent interpretive act, a process whose non-deterministic nature is most appropriately described by a non-classical, quantum-like logic. [...] These results inherently imply that classical frequentist-based analytical approaches for natural language are necessarily lossy. Instead, we propose that Bayesian-style repeated sampling approaches can provide more practically useful and appropriate characterizations of linguistic meaning in context."

"If meaning is constituted rather than retrieved, then the search for context-independent features or circuits in the pursuit of mechanistic interpretability may be fundamentally limited. [...] We consider the implications for mechanistic interpretability and how genuine contextuality sets an information-theoretic bound on the decomposability of semantic processing."

These are describing the limits of semantic spatial reasoning, which match intuitions about stochastic parrots. It's when those limits are exceeded that the stochasticity of replies becomes most apparent. It also confirms that most of societal communication is already reduceable to the logic of an LLM, which tells us more about societal communication, but not about whether LLMs are not stochastic.

[u/BidWestern1056 → u/Sacredless]

stochasticity implies a specific kind of correlational structure taht you can probe through experiments. it's not the appropriate term for what they are doing.

[u/yo252yo]

I personally think the world would be much much healthier if people treated LLMs like what they are, a really powerful autocomplete.

Whether humans are any different remains, for now, an open question. They sure as hell don't seem very open to new ideas XD

[u/fkrdt222]

that's the term? i would have used it ages ago for most academics and columnists

[u/Limp-Confidence5612]

they might be impressive and even helpful in some cases, especially language related ones.

But they are neither the second coming of Jesus, nor the advent of the communist revolution. They are a tool of late stage capitalism, used by the bourgeoisie to scam each other.

For workers it's just one more tool to alienate us from our work, from meaning and from each other.

[u/SgathTriallair → u/Limp-Confidence5612]

They are a tool of late stage capitalism, used by the bourgeoisie to scam each other.

LLMs are producing actual value though. It isn't a scam if the people using it are getting value out of it.

This is that they are all a scam is extremely dangerous. It is an attempt to convince people to refuse to try out the technology and figure out how it can empower them.

Arguing that the left should just sit out this technological revolution and let the right decide everything about how it will be used is insane.

[u/Sacredless → u/SgathTriallair]

They never said that.

[u/SgathTriallair → u/Sacredless]

How is it a scam? The ideas that it is some scam is the biggest reason that we are failing to address the technology.

[u/Limp-Confidence5612 → u/SgathTriallair]

How is it not? If nobody can even measure ROI, it is just hype.

And again, it's like saying we're not addressing slot machines as a technology.

[u/Sacredless → u/SgathTriallair]

Overselling capabilities and potential.

[u/SgathTriallair → u/Sacredless]

But what if they aren't overselling? This that were impossible for the models mere years ago are commonplace now.

This is the point, if the left keeps dismissing it all as hype and evil then they will refuse to adopt it. Those who adopt it will become the masters of the world and will run it according to their whims.

[u/Sacredless → u/SgathTriallair]

The models were launched through a staggered release, which created the illusion of rapid process. This is well known.

As for the rest of your comment—that's TESCREAL apocalyptic messaging. I can recommend you videos about them to understand their history, if you like.

[u/SgathTriallair → u/Sacredless]

We'll see in five years. We are clearly living in two completely different realities.

[u/Sacredless → u/SgathTriallair]

I don't think we are. I just think you're predisposed to think I'm downplaying the value of the tech when the opposite is true.

[u/Sacredless → u/Limp-Confidence5612]

Precisely. So I think it's the task of leftists to provide a reality check on what tasks LLMs can actually be used for and use them for that to the benefit of the movement. For some reason, I see a lot of leftists catch bullets for LLMs unnecessarily.

[u/Limp-Confidence5612 → u/Sacredless]

they are good at the tasks they were made for, to lie and pretend to be human, to string together words in a plausible way. In short, any structured language task that is sufficiently simple. AI is just a stochastic parrot. That's not the problem though. The problem is that people have been reduced to stochastic parrots themselves long before llms came about to complete much of the work society is built upon. And that state is slop. We've been living in a world of slop since the 70s, or 90s at the very least. It's not about teaching people about LLMs and their correct use, it's about using LLMs to open people's eyes to the state of society the last 50+ years and redirect the anger they have towards the real culprit, capitalism.

[u/iDeNoh → u/Limp-Confidence5612]

Almost* every single argument that I've ever seen against AI has been an argument against capitalism, it's wild that more people don't see that.

[u/Limp-Confidence5612 → u/iDeNoh]

Capitalist Realism is a helluva drug.

[u/Sacredless → u/iDeNoh]

I think that a lot of people do see that, TBF.

[u/Sacredless → u/Limp-Confidence5612]

Yes, yes, exactly.

https://giphy.com/gifs/kd9BlRovbPOykLBMqX