Stochastic Parrots

Few people understand language quite like today’s guest. Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington.

She’s also the person who coined the term ‘Stochastic Parrots’ in the now infamous paper that saw Google fire its Ethical AI lead; and the co-author of The AI Con, a book which is unflinching in its criticism of both AI boosterism and doomerism (in fact she objects to the term AI).

I sat down with Emily to discuss topics such as:

• How language really works

• What LLMs are actually doing

• What Stochastic Parrots really means

• Why doomers and boosters are two sides of the same, misleading coin