Stochastic Parrots and Beyond

Orientation · Normative Dimensions of Generative AI

Laura Wagner and Moritz Mähr

License

These slides are licensed under CC BY 4.0. You can copy, change, and teach them if you give credit.

Source and handouts: maehr.github.io/stochastic-parrots-and-beyond

Press S for the presenter notes and ? for the keyboard shortcuts.

Open with the license slide only briefly. It tells participants that they may keep and reuse everything. Then move to the question.

Our question

How can we make — and defend — a responsible decision about generative AI in our own research?

• Not a list of permitted and forbidden tools.
• A transparent position that you can explain to colleagues, reviewers, and the people your research affects.

Ask: “Who has used a generative AI system for research this month?” Do not ask for details yet. Transition: “Before we judge a use, we need ways of looking at it. We use four lenses.”

Four lenses

1. Scale and environment. What does a model cost, and where do its data come from?
2. Representation and Displacement. Whose perspectives become normal?
3. Lifecycle and labor. Who does the work, and who carries the risk?
4. Political economy. Which incentives keep a practice in place?

In the afternoon, Panarchy connects the lenses to the levels where change is possible.

Name each lens with its question. Point out that the lenses overlap on purpose. A single use can raise questions in all four.

One lifecycle, six stages

Original diagram. CC BY 4.0.

Read the stages from left to right. Say that we will mark risks at each stage. Transition: “Let us start with one hypothetical example and look at it through all four lenses.”

A short case

Hypothetical example

A doctoral candidate in history wants to use a hosted chatbot to summarize 200 digitized newspaper articles for a literature review.

Lens	First question
Scale and environment	What is known about the model’s training data and energy use?
Representation	Whose voices does the summary make typical, and whose does it drop?
Lifecycle and labor	Who labeled the data, and who checks the summaries?
Political economy	What does the provider gain, and what does the university pay?

This example is invented for teaching.

Ask the group to add one question per lens. The Lens groups later use four guiding questions for each Lens.

Concepts we use all day

• Stochastic parrot: Bender et al.’s term for a system that stitches together linguistic forms from its training data “without any reference to meaning” (2021, 617). Whether such systems understand is debated (Mitchell and Krakauer 2023).
• Documented vs. hypothetical: we mark every example. A product name is not evidence.
• Known, unknown, avoidable: three columns for every cost.
• Levels: a change in a project, a department, a university, an industry, or a law.

Stress the difference between documented and hypothetical. Ask participants to challenge any claim that has no source. Keep four questions apart: how a system is trained, what it can do for a task, whether it understands, and whether a use is justified. The course needs no answer to the third question to ask the fourth.

Your Research Use Card · 10 minutes

Alone. Take Sheet 1. On the right, fill in the Research Use Card:

• the task: one actual or planned use of generative AI in your research,
• the system or tool,
• why you might use it,
• what you do not know about it,
• who else is affected.

This is your Research Use. It stays your Research Use all day. Leave the field “Lens” empty for now.

Do not write confidential or personal data on the card.

Keep strict time. The cards stay with the participants. After the four Lens inputs, each participant writes the Lens that fits their Research Use best on the card. The Lens groups form after the break.

The day

1. Four Lenses, 15 minutes each: theory and one example.
2. Lens groups: apply the four questions of one Lens to each Research Use.
3. Spokespersons report to the plenary.
4. Panarchy Block 1: your challenge, your Panarchy Chart, and a group Action Plan.
5. Panarchy Block 2: the open challenges in pairs.
6. Your individual Action Plan, peer review, and the course evaluation.

The edition page gives the times.

Do not give times on this slide. Each participant leaves with an individual Action Plan. It prepares the follow-up task: the Responsible GenAI Use Statement.

Sources

• Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, and Shmitchell (2021): On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.
• Mitchell and Krakauer (2023): The Debate over Understanding in AI’s Large Language Models.
• Course website: lenses, handouts, and literature.

Takeaway

We do not look for permission. We look for reasons that we can defend.

Stochastic Parrots and Beyond · Laura Wagner and Moritz Mähr · CC BY 4.0

Transition to Lens 1: “The first lens asks what a model’s performance hides.”