Stochastic Parrot

A system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.

Is my toddler a stochastic parrot? from the new yorker by Angie Wang

Basically, the idea is that AI has no context, and is not a real thinker. Machines do not think like humans, they weave linguistic patterns, playing a game of probabilities. The way I put it is that AI does not have a context; just a toddler, at first. But a toddler grow out of it and AI won’t.

On the contrary, from A Camera, Not an Engine:

This is what the Stochastic Parrot takes (and the older monkeys-at-typewriters take) entirely miss. We’re all stochastic parrots attached to monkeys on typewriters all the way down. That’s only insulting if you don’t like parrots and monkeys and imagine you possess some ineffably higher-order consciousness their kinds of minds cannot embody. The fascinating thing is, parrots and monkeys are all you need. That’s all it seems to take to produce anything we consider intelligent behavior, and we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of that behavior space, which is far vaster than we imagined.

Objective: how would Alan Watts put it?

[!GPT] A method that whimsically weaves a tapestry of linguistic patterns, drawing upon the abundant reservoir of its training data. It plays a game of probabilities, determining the odds of how these patterns coalesce, yet it navigates this linguistic labyrinth without any regard for meaning or context.