This post offers up a close reading of a section of the Stochastic Parrots paper, to make sense of an increasingly contested analogy. The reading is my interpretation, which draws from the text in the 2021 paper by Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major and (S)Mitchell. This year, Bender and Mitchell have both written updates; I cite Mitchell's often and you should probably read that before this.

I admit I might not understand what a stochastic parrot is meant to be, or rather, what you imagine it to be. My version is basically, "systems that produce fluent text with no informed intention and operate without accountability," though this is likely a narrower (or more permissive) claim than the original.

Nonetheless, I have real respect for the authors, and the paper, even as I grow more disoriented about what's true about its claims, compared to what people claim about its claims.

So I'll unpack this by examining, line by line, the section related to the term and how I interpret it, humanities-style. This is not as an explainer, but an informed reader trying to make sense of a text. I've written the section from pages 616-617 out, sentence by sentence below, in bold. This is the core of the definition, though there is some interesting precursory text ahead of it.