Disrupting Stochastic Parrots with Practical Wisdom

If AI is just a sophisticated copycat machine, what does that make us?In this episode, the team pits large language models against Aristotle’s vision of human agency and practical wisdom. Along the way, they explore why imitation isn’t the same as understanding—and why real intelligence may depend on risk, vulnerability, and the possibility of missing the mark.At the heart of the discussion is a key distinction: the stochastic parrot, which predicts words based on probability, and the stochastic archer, a human agent who takes aim at meaningful ends.Further Reading:Ardelt, Monika, and Stephen Bruya. “Does Phronesis Promote Eudaimonia? Empirical Research on Practical Wisdom and Flourishing.” 2018. Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2021. Kirby, Christopher. “Aristotle, On the Art of Associated Living.” Medium, November 6, 2021. Summerfield, Christopher. These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means. 2024. Noë, Alva. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. 2009.Episode CreditsProducer and Editor: Dr. Christopher C. KirbyThis work is made possible by the Jeffers W. Chertok Memorial Endowment at Eastern Washington University.**The views expressed in this program are not necessarily those of Eastern Washington University