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> I'd like the "stochastic parrot" crew to explain how interactions like this somehow don't involve the extraction of and manipulation of abstract meaning. The

> I'd like the "stochastic parrot" crew to explain how interactions like this somehow don't involve the extraction of and manipulation of abstract meaning. They don’t claim that it doesn’t. What they point out is that humans have a tendency to ascribe intent and agency to the text it outputs. But the LLM is optimized for prediction, not survival, unlike humans[0]: > Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent. […] Our perception of natural language [is mediated by] our predisposition to interpret communicative acts as conveying coherent meaning and intent Some of the dangers they raise associated with this is that it will not realize that words it chooses are PII, dangerous to give to who they are talking to, or biased in a way that can cause societal harm: > If the LM or word embeddings derived from it are used as components in a text classification system, these biases can lead to allocational and/or reputational harms. […] A Palestinian man [was] arrested by Israeli police, after MT translated his Facebook post which said “good morning” (in Arabic) to “hurt them” (in English). What they encourage is to view it as a tool and assess how it may fail. For instance, you might object that the MT was simply incorrect; but realistically, sentences can be translated in many ways and with many intents (eg. Allah Akbar has a lot of contexts!) and the LLM may not be given the full picture of the situation. The stochastic parrots paper is heavily misrepresented or used by people that don’t seem like they read it. For instance, it was cited in a recent petition asking to stop work on powerful AI, prompting a response from the authors[1] pointing out that it misunderstands the paper and emphasizing that they disagree with the petition. [0]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922 [1]: https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March2023 https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March20...

knome 4y ago
>The stochastic parrots paper is heavily misrepresented I listened to a lengthy video on the "stochastic parrot" from the Alan Turing Institute yesterday after having made that comment, and it was mostly on the topics you mentioned, subtle and overt bias, etc. I kept waiting on them to explain the "it's not real" bit that I've seen implied by the phrase where I've seen it used ( or perhaps, simply read into it myself ), but it never really came in. At the very end, one commentator made a comment implying it's not really all there and the next responding didn't disagree outright, but you could see a kind of "well yes, but actually no" kind of expression go across their face as they talked around it.

knome 4y ago

>The stochastic parrots paper is heavily misrepresented I listened to a lengthy video on the "stochastic parrot" from the Alan Turing Institute yesterday after having made that comment, and it was mostly on the topics you mentioned, subtle and overt bias, etc. I kept waiting on them to explain the "it's not real" bit that I've seen implied by the phrase where I've seen it used ( or perhaps, simply read into it myself ), but it never really came in. At the very end, one commentator made a comment implying it's not really all there and the next responding didn't disagree outright, but you could see a kind of "well yes, but actually no" kind of expression go across their face as they talked around it.