Her thesis is that the whizzy chatbots and image-generation tools created by OpenAI and rivals Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, Google and Meta are little more than “stochastic parrots”, a term that she coined in a 2021 paper. A stochastic parrot, she wrote, 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”.
The paper shot her to prominence and triggered a backlash in AI circles. Two of her co-authors, senior members of the ethical AI team at Google, lost their jobs at the company shortly after publication. Bender has also faced criticism from other academics for what they regard as a heretical stance. “It feels like people are mad that I am undermining what they see as the sort of crowning achievement of our field,” she says.
The controversy highlighted tensions between those looking to commercialise AI fast and opponents warning of its harms and urging more responsible development. In the four years since, the former group has been ascendant.
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