Is your AI a stochastic parrot?

Let us say that you have a pet parrot. His name is Beau. You teach Beau to sing ‘I’m a little teapot, short and stout.’ It amuses you that every morning Beau greets you with the song. Beau is a good mimic of human language; indeed, if someone outside your house overhears Beau, that person would presume they were hearing a fellow human being.

We have granted that your parrot is a good mimic. Does your parrot understand the meaning of the words it is mimicking?

Type ‘I’m a little’ into your favourite AI model. Does it successfully complete with ‘teapot, short and stout’? Does it understand the meaning of the words it is completing?

AI is sometimes described as a stochastic parrot. In other words, the claim is that it probabilistically (hence ‘stochastic’) predicts what are the next words in a sequence based on its training data but does not comprehend.

To be truly intelligent, it is not enough to recognise a pattern of text. What is needed is comprehension.

Perhaps this is analogous to our concerns about robot carers. Yes, the robot carer may mimic empathy but there is no soul behind the seemingly concerned eyes. Most people would want a human nurse, not a simulacrum.

What do you think?

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