Little Poll Parrot
Sat in his garret
Eating toast and tea.
A little brown mouse
Jumped into the house
And stole it all away.
— nursery rhymeIf you like the parrots and getting caught in the rain
If you like making love at midnight under the trees on the cape
Then I’m the love that you’ve looked for, write to me and escape
— The Parrot Song
Well, yes, tariffs (by Canada, against those levied by the Grabpussy administration of my country), not my misheard parrots. But I was taken by the idea of billions of dollars in parrots, bright parrots in the air.
And so was led down the psittacine path of associative memory. Some highlights on the path …
— the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch — This is an ex-parrot!
— pirates with their parrots
— Polly want a cracker (see my 2/1/21 posting “Two parrots and a pear tree”; the parrots are the ones on pirates’ shoulders and the ones who, apparently, want a cracker — be suspicious about those crackers, very suspicious)
— the parrots of Telegraph Hill (see the Wikipedia page on the 2003 documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill)
— on Facebook, Ruth Lawrence’s appreciative photos of the parrots around her in Oz
— Emily Menon Bender’s stochastic parrot of AI (about which I will now say more, because I was on EMB’s dissertation committee at Stanford and she is both a valued colleague and old friend)
From Wikipedia:
In machine learning, the term stochastic parrot is a metaphor that frames large language models as systems that statistically mimic text without real understanding. The word stochastic – from the ancient Greek στοχαστικός (stokhastikos, ‘based on guesswork’) – is a term from probability theory meaning ‘randomly determined’. The word parrot refers to parrots’ ability to mimic human speech.
The term was introduced in a 2021 paper on AI ethics titled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” [written] by Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. The paper outlined possible risks associated with large language models (LLMs). In December 2020, it was the subject of a workplace dispute between Gebru (then co-leader of Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team) and Google, which had requested the retraction of the paper. The incident culminated in Gebru’s controversial departure from the company.
The paper was later presented at the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, and the term stochastic parrot has seen widespread use in academic research concerning generative AI and LLMs.
Your own path through associative memory has no doubt taken you to other things.
August 26, 2026 at 8:29 am |
Oh yes: piña colada (Rupert Holmes).
August 26, 2026 at 9:18 am |
I have, from time to time while daydreaming or awaiting sleep at night, realized that I was thinking about something unexpected. I would then attempt to trace my train of thought from the topic I had started with. Often I am successful, if the train is not too long and the jumps are not huge leaps, but it hasn’t occurred to me to write it down (especially when trying to fall asleep). I should try to do that, as I am curious to see how it would look after a passage of time.
Meanwhile, the term “stochastic parrot,” new to me, has really grabbed me. Thanks for that!
August 26, 2026 at 9:25 am |
It gives me great pleasure to have jogged someone’s thoughts. Thanks for telling me.