The Stochastic Parrot

The stochastic parrot is the invention of linguist Emily Bender – the creator of another memorable fictional animal, the Statistical Octopus – which she uses to criticize the Large Language Models (LLMs) on which ChatGPT and other forms of AI are based.

The Statistical Octopus

The linguist Emily Bender has recently given another illustration of the way AI cannot grasp meaning.

The Chinese Room

Alan Turing, one of the pioneer theoreticians of computing, proposed what is now known as the Turing Test: if a computer can pass for a human in a text-based interaction, we should grant that it is intelligent.

Introduction

It is often claimed that Artificial Intelligence is making such spectacularly rapid progress that all its current problems will soon be solved.