Emily Bender's case against treating chatbots as minds

Emily M. Bender, the University of Washington computational linguist who coined the phrase 'stochastic parrot,' spends much of a New York Magazine profile arguing that people are confusing word form with meaning when they talk to chatbots. 'Please do not conflate word form and meaning,' she tells Elizabeth Weil. 'Mind your own credulity.'

Bender is 49. She runs the computational-linguistics master's program she launched at UW in 2005. Her 2020 paper with Alexander Koller, 'Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data,' argues the point through an octopus thought experiment: a hyperintelligent cephalopod learns to predict responses on an underwater telegraph line between two stranded English speakers, but cannot help when one calls 'I'm being attacked by an angry bear' because it has no referents for bears or sticks.

The 2021 follow-up she co-wrote with Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell, 'On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?,' described large language models as systems 'stitching together sequences of linguistic forms ... according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.' Gebru and Mitchell lost their positions at Google after it circulated.

The profile lines Bender up against a discipline that has moved on without her. Stanford computational linguist Christopher Manning defends the older view that 'the meaning of a word is simply a description of the contexts in which it appears,' the distributional-semantics position her paper rejects. Sam Altman tweeted 'i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u' on December 4, reclaiming her critique as a joke. Blake Lemoine, the Google researcher fired after claiming LaMDA was sentient, sits at the other pole.

Bender's counter is more moral than technical. 'I'm not going to converse with people who won't posit my humanity as an axiom,' she tells Weil. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, quoted in the same piece, puts it in property-crime terms: 'Counterfeit money has been seen as vandalism against society ... Counterfeit people is at least as serious.'