Emily M. Bender? Timnit Gebru? Angelina McMillan-Major? Margaret Mitchell? Apocryphal?

Question for Quote Investigator: Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have used vast amounts of text to train digital neural networks which capture the intricate statistical patterns of word sequences. The resultant systems are called large language models. One of the most famous is GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3).
Language models (LMs) are able to perform a variety of tasks, e.g., answering questions, summarizing documents, generating text, and translating text. However, influential AI researchers believe these capabilities are misleading and often overestimated. Thus, these models should be considered merely “stochastic parrots”. Would you please help to find a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: In March 2021 Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell (who used the pseudonym Shmargaret Shmitchell) published “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” which critically examined recent research efforts. The title included a parrot emoji. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
Contrary to how it may seem when we observe its output, an LM is 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: a stochastic parrot.
On October 8, 2021 QI sent a tweet to authors Emily M. Bender and Timnit Gebru asking about the coinage of the memorable phrase “stochastic parrot”. Gebru gave credit to Bender,2 and Bender concurred:3
Yep, that was me. As it happens, I did a search when the paper was under review and before Google made a news story out of it, to see if it had been used online before then, and wasn’t able to find any instances.
Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
Continue reading “Quote Origin: Stitching Together Sequences of Linguistic Forms . . . Without Any Reference To Meaning: A Stochastic Parrot”