Dr. Timnit Gebru’s most famous and controversial research paper is entitled On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Co-authored with Emily M. Bender in 2020. It is widely credited with coining the term “stochastic parrot” to describe modern Artificial Intelligence (AI). A stochastic parrot is a metaphor used to describe Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT or Claude. It suggests that while AI systems are remarkably good at generating fluent, human-like text, they do so purely by predicting word probabilities based on vast amounts of data—meaning they possess no true understanding of what they are actually saying. Gebru was working at Google then and was fired that same year from her position there as an AI ethicist, because she refused to pull her paper. A paper that predicted the problems that have been found with these models. Not a good look for the company whose motto was once don’t be evil.

Anne and I split wood together. Then after she completely finished her new chainmail sweater top, we went out to dinner at the Cozy Inn. This early in the season the place was pretty empty, except for the Piedmonts. Who were there in force. We were too late to join them at their table but got an invite for next week. After dinner, we nerded out with the Scripps Spelling Bee. We rooted for 12-year-old Logan Bailey until he fell with Quincke tube, an acoustic device used to demonstrate the interference of sound waves and calculate the speed of sound. Even throwing in a reference to K-Pop Demon Hunters did not help him. This is our kind of sporting event.

Speaking of Anne and AI, I would like to offer an alternative to artificial intelligence, Anne’s Intelligence. It is all natural, nothing artificial about it. The best thing about it is that it does not require a prompt to activate. It will tell you out-of-the-blue when you are doing something wrong. Like in, “Mark, don’t do that!” or “Polly wants a cracker.” You get the idea.