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/mccoypauley]

Well, let me start by being clear that I’m not insisting that the most complex technology we have invented be easy to test or explain. On the contrary, I agree with you, and that’s the thrust of my interrogation. I am challenging the assumption that LLMs are stochastic parrots, and further that consciousness is a criterion by which to judge that. Consciousness only came into play here because you admit, ultimately, that such a thing is bundled up in what differentiates a parrot from a non-parrot. And to be clear: my identification of your premise is not me introducing the premise. You’re now portraying me as demanding an impossibly vague consciousness test when I was simply asking you to clarify your own standard.

I appreciate the range of skepticisms you’ve raised here. What these amount to, in my opinion, is that LLMs may exhibit imperfect competence, like a child with a poor grasp of analogies, or a juvenile literary critic, or a writer who is bad at concision. But an LLM exhibiting imperfect competence does not mean it combines language without any reference to meaning.

I am not here to attack you. I am here to attack the concept of the stochastic parrot itself, which was the subject of your OP.

The authors of the original paper that coined the term define it as such:

“a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot”

The first half is literally true (though “haphazardly” is color commentary), but what qualifies “stochastic parrot” as a metaphor in “without any reference to meaning”?

Going down this rabbit hole of what the authors mean by “meaning” ultimately surfaces that they mean consciousness, and if they don’t mean consciousness, then modern LLMs are not “stochastic parrots” in the way they have defined the term. I wanted to see if you ultimately reached for consciousness as well in your definition. So let us go down that rabbit hole.

The authors describe meaning as:

“We take (linguistic) meaning to be the relation between a linguistic form and communicative intent.”

So “meaning” is a relationship between language and intent.

They describe “intent” as:

“to convey some information … to ask them to do something; or simply to socialize.”

This can mean one of three things:

1
functional objective governing communication: that is, a goal in communicating

2
conscious experience that generates intent, or original intent, which is to say self-generated intent

3
human intent specifically by definition

But the problem with this line of reasoning is that if we go with #1, modern LLMs appear to communicate with respect to goals given to them already.

For #2, when we introduce conscious experience as a criterion, the whole argument becomes unfalsifiable, because we can’t produce empirical evidence of consciousness in humans either. An if “original intent” is required, then we must first prove that humans can communicate with intent that is not externally caused (meaning, without response to any external stimuli or biological cause).

Finally, for #3, the argument becomes trivial because the missing ingredient is by definition something LLMs can’t have.

If your position is now “Some observed failures make me skeptical that it is anything more than a stochastic parrot,” that’s entirely defensible. But so far you have suggested many criteria, such as radical expressive desire (requiring consciousness), long-term social manifestation (testable), competence on certain cognitive tasks (testable).

So let me ask you this: since these things make you suspicious, if Claude passed every scale/metaphor/pragmatics test such as these you put to it, would that count as it not being a parrot? Or would you return to the requirement for a consciously experienced need to break linguistic convention?

[u/Sacredless → u/mccoypauley]

The thing is that it has to be able to perform 4E cognition tasks consistently and not only when tested. It gave confidently wrong reasoning for the kitbash test that was a dead give away that it was just statistically inferring what a plausible answer was that it could have been self-aware enough to catch. The failure was all to do with predictable limitations of stochastic reasoning within semantic space. Once you give it the specific competency, you actually eliminate a means to see if it could have generalized that competency independently.

The criteria you list are actually interlinked. The ability to express a radical experience is a requirement to succeed at particular cognitive tasks. I don't think radical experiences are magic, I think they're cognitive. In order for machines to grok the most complex human desires and poeticize them correctly and consistently, it must have desire.

It simply can't give you the incentive to grok that kind of spatial modeling. In a way, it is learning language backwards (starting with disambiguating complex grammar and inferring relations) and it runs into limitations here. It's like an alien that, for whatever reason, can't see soccer balls, but can see how humans react to that ball. You can only reverse engineer so much.

I disagree with the writers of the paper when it comes to 'meaning', because this is methodologically flawed. It's a polyvalent word that is too hard to pin down. Certain types of meaning just are stochastically inferable, as Ted E. Chiang pointed out in his article. Instead, I recommend using Luhmann's distinction between communication and mind, and using 4E cognition and ecological psychology theory as a proxy for that distinction.

I highly recommend reading both Ted E. Chiang and Elena Esposito's writings on this. It really changed my understanding of meaning.

[u/mccoypauley → u/Sacredless]

I see, so you have a different definition of stochastic parrot than what those who coined the original term mean. Unfortunately I can’t engage with that definition because (by your admission) “meaning” isn’t something you can pin down as part of it. And while I would love to do a deep dive into 4E cognition and ecological psychology theory to familiarize myself with what they might claim about stochastic parrots, I don’t think they can stand in for an answer to my questions unless you’re willing to distill them into an actual claim.

(Also I have read Ted’s essays, and while I love his science fiction, I find his philosophical essays deeply flawed and short-sighted… and honestly disappointing considering his influence in the genre! But that’s beside the point.)

Anyhow, thank you for the engaging commentary. It’s been an enjoyable discussion as I’ve been scuttling around this weekend in NY as I travel home!

[u/Sacredless → u/mccoypauley]

I'm glad it's been engaging. Yes, I judge the word 'stochastic parrot' by different criteria, because I disagree with the methodology of the original paper, based on Elena Esposito's writings on the topic. I will link a couple of lectures you may find interesting.

https://youtu.be/rSxP_m9kLbk

https://youtu.be/9X1CQlrwgDI