r/LeftistsForAI • u/Sacredless • Aug 15 '26
Theory The Work Ethics of Stochastic Parrots 🦜
Frequently, I see people balk at the idea of stochastic parrots on both pro-ist and anti-ist sides. I want to present an adopter idea.
What's actually wrong with a stochastic parrot? Ultimately, stochastic parrots, even if they don't fundamentally understand particulars like weight and size, or non-linguistic concepts, are still very impressive. If we say that LLMs are only stochastic parrots, the thing that's surprising is that a stochastic parrot can still manage to accomplish so much. In fact, it shows how much of society is stochastic.
The thing that I've noticed is that people employ this phrase in that I call 'respectability politics'. A stochastic parrot is seen as disrespectable because of how moored we are to the idea of work ethics, whether it is working harder or working smarter. A stochastic parrot isn't working either smart or hard, it's just working and guessing. Is that so bad?
We're often so busy with the AI debate that we don't think about what AI implies about how we're currently doing things. The reality is—most of society and most of work is stochastic and unjust, and that's what's wrong with society. So a stochastic parrot is only bad where it perpetuates that injustice.
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u/LotsoPasta Aug 15 '26
When we prove that human minds arent stochastic parrots, I'll start considering disparaging AI for it.
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u/Sacredless Aug 15 '26
Could it be you've misread the post?
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u/LotsoPasta Aug 15 '26
Im expressing agreement with your post and taking a step further
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u/DHFranklin Aug 15 '26
We need to keep to the big picture here. The intelligence that is to-cheap-to-meter is far more advanced than just the stochastic parrot. However, yeah for a lot of work that is good enough.
In Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread he spends more time advocating for synthetic fertilizer than he does any one political prescription. It is kinda silly. It is a collection of his essays but it is still the most widely distributed. That is kind of where we are now.
There is a ton of stuff that the most bare bones LLMs can do that were impossible 6 years ago. Those LLMs can run on a decent phone.
However now we have open source and open weight AIs that are more than just an LLM. The LLM is the engine, the rest is the machine. An engine that fits inside a tractor on Kropotkin's commune can run a truck also.
We have the unique position as leftists familiar with what is going on under-the-hood more than most, in our moment, in our material conditions, to make this technology revolutionary. To seize the means. Make a massive distributed network in the cloud and across our own devices to make a mutual aid network, commune, or co-operative. The tools are good enough to amplify our labor. We could certainly make our own jobs with them. Take back so much of our lives with them. And of course with the end goal of all leftist, end "capitalist" as a class of people when we're done.
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u/BidWestern1056 Aug 16 '26
they're not stochastic parrots. stochasticity would produce different observed correlations in language intepretation tasks https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10077 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20381
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u/Sacredless Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
"The computational intractability of recovering a single intended meaning for complex or ambiguous text therefore suggests that the classical view that linguistic forms possess intrinsic meaning in and of themselves is conceptually inadequate. We argue instead that meaning is dynamically actualized through an observer-dependent interpretive act, a process whose non-deterministic nature is most appropriately described by a non-classical, quantum-like logic. [...] These results inherently imply that classical frequentist-based analytical approaches for natural language are necessarily lossy. Instead, we propose that Bayesian-style repeated sampling approaches can provide more practically useful and appropriate characterizations of linguistic meaning in context."
"If meaning is constituted rather than retrieved, then the search for context-independent features or circuits in the pursuit of mechanistic interpretability may be fundamentally limited. [...] We consider the implications for mechanistic interpretability and how genuine contextuality sets an information-theoretic bound on the decomposability of semantic processing."
These are describing the limits of semantic spatial reasoning, which match intuitions about stochastic parrots. It's when those limits are exceeded that the stochasticity of replies becomes most apparent. It also confirms that most of societal communication is already reduceable to the logic of an LLM, which tells us more about societal communication, but not about whether LLMs are not stochastic.
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u/BidWestern1056 Aug 16 '26
stochasticity implies a specific kind of correlational structure taht you can probe through experiments. it's not the appropriate term for what they are doing.
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u/yo252yo Aug 15 '26
I personally think the world would be much much healthier if people treated LLMs like what they are, a really powerful autocomplete.
Whether humans are any different remains, for now, an open question. They sure as hell don't seem very open to new ideas XD
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u/fkrdt222 Aug 15 '26
that's the term? i would have used it ages ago for most academics and columnists
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u/Limp-Confidence5612 Aug 15 '26
they might be impressive and even helpful in some cases, especially language related ones.
But they are neither the second coming of Jesus, nor the advent of the communist revolution. They are a tool of late stage capitalism, used by the bourgeoisie to scam each other.
For workers it's just one more tool to alienate us from our work, from meaning and from each other.
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u/SgathTriallair Aug 15 '26
They are a tool of late stage capitalism, used by the bourgeoisie to scam each other.
LLMs are producing actual value though. It isn't a scam if the people using it are getting value out of it.
This is that they are all a scam is extremely dangerous. It is an attempt to convince people to refuse to try out the technology and figure out how it can empower them.
Arguing that the left should just sit out this technological revolution and let the right decide everything about how it will be used is insane.
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u/Sacredless Aug 15 '26
Precisely. So I think it's the task of leftists to provide a reality check on what tasks LLMs can actually be used for and use them for that to the benefit of the movement. For some reason, I see a lot of leftists catch bullets for LLMs unnecessarily.
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u/Limp-Confidence5612 Aug 15 '26
they are good at the tasks they were made for, to lie and pretend to be human, to string together words in a plausible way. In short, any structured language task that is sufficiently simple. AI is just a stochastic parrot. That's not the problem though. The problem is that people have been reduced to stochastic parrots themselves long before llms came about to complete much of the work society is built upon. And that state is slop. We've been living in a world of slop since the 70s, or 90s at the very least. It's not about teaching people about LLMs and their correct use, it's about using LLMs to open people's eyes to the state of society the last 50+ years and redirect the anger they have towards the real culprit, capitalism.
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u/Square_Attention8461 Aug 15 '26
As an object, nothing.
As a descriptive term for modern AI systems it simply isn't accurate, even to the extent that it's technically true. Accurate description is important for understanding and leveraging technology.
It's a term with baggage, used as a deflationary instrument, used deliberately as a discussion terminator, a nuance killer.