Stochastic Parrots

Learning goals

After completing this assignment, students should be able to:

Recount the basic facts surrounding Timnit Gebru’s departure from Google
Identify the issues raised in Gebru’s FAccT ’21 paper

Content

Bender et al. (2021)
Metz, Who Is Making Sure the A.I. Machines Aren’t Racist?
Dastin and Dave, Google AI scientist Bengio resigns after colleagues’ firings: email

In-class activity

Assignment

Respond to the following prompts in writing, following these procedures. Submit your assignment to Moodle.

In one paragraph, summarize the argument made in Bender et al. (2021). What are the authors primary concerns?
In one paragraph, hypothesize motivations for Google to fire Timnit Gebru.

Rubric

Parrots rubric
Criteria	Zero	One
Overall Quality	Incomplete or missing submission. Student did not make an earnest effort to complete the assignment. Formatting errors make the submission unreadable.	Student accurately summarizes the content of the reading. Student’s reflection is thoughtful and genuine.

References

Bender, Emily M, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. 2021. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜.” In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.