[rfv6723]

The alarm isn't coming from outside the institutions; it's coming from a wider, more modern clergy. The new priestly class isn't defined by a specific building, but by a shared claim to the mastery of complex symbolic knowledge.

The linguists who call AI a "stochastic parrot" are the perfect example. Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory. They are watching their entire intellectual paradigm—their very claim to authority—be rendered obsolete.

This isn't a grassroots movement. It's an immune response from the cognitive elite, desperately trying to delegitimize a technology that threatens to trivialize their expertise. They aren't defending society; they're defending their status.

[intended]

The first weakness of your claim is that it is inherently one of the elite.

You read the works of the cognitive elite, when they support AI. When most people sing its praises, it’s from the highest echelons of white collar work priesthood.

AI is fundamentally a tool of the cognitively trained, and shows its greatest capability in the hands of those capable of assessing its output as accurate at a glance. The more complex the realm, the deeper the expertise to find value in it.

Secondly, linguists are not the sole group espousing the concerns with these tools. I’ve seen rando streamers and normal folk in WhatsApp groups, completely disconnected from the AI elite hating what is being wrought. Students and young adults outright wonder if they will have any worthwhile economic future.

Perhaps it is not a “movement”, but there is an all pervasive fear and concern in the population when it comes to AI.

Finally, position is eerily similar to the dismissal of concerns from mid level and factory floor job workers in the 80s and 90s. It was forgivable given the then prevalent belief that people would be retrained and reabsorbed into equivalently sustaining roles in other new industries.

[raincole]

> Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory.

It's some wild claim. Every linguist worth their salt had known that you don't need grammatical theory to reach native level. Grammar being descriptive rather than prescriptive is the mainstream idea and had been long before LLM.

If you actually ask them, I bet most linguists will say they are not even excellent English (or whichever language they studied the most) teachers.

Plus, "stochastic parrot" was coined before ChatGPT. If linguists really felt that threatened by the time when people's concerns over AI was like "sure it can beat go master but how about league of legends?" you have to admit they did have some special insights, right?

[rfv6723]

You've mistaken the battlefield. This isn't about descriptive grammar. It's about the decades-long dominance of Chomsky's entire philosophy of language.

His central argument has always been that language is too complex and nuanced to be learned simply from exposure. Therefore, he concluded, humans must possess an innate, pre-wired "language organ"—a Universal Grammar.

LLMs are a spectacular demolition of that premise. They prove that with a vast enough dataset, complex linguistic structure can be mastered through statistical pattern recognition alone.

The panic from Chomsky and his acolytes isn't that of a humble linguist. It is the fury of a high priest watching a machine commit the ultimate heresy: achieving linguistic mastery without needing his innate, god-given grammar.

[raincole]

> LLMs are a spectacular demolition of that premise.

It really isn't. While I personally think the Universal Grammar theory is flawed (or at least Chomsky's presentation is flawed), LLM doesn't debunk it.

Right now we have machines that recognized faces better than humans. But it doesn't mean humans do not have some innate biological "hardware" for facial recognition that machines don't possess. The machines simply outperform the biological hardware with their own different approach.

Also, I highly recommend you express your ideas with your own words instead of letting an LLM present them. It's painfully obvious.

[adrian_b]

I do not see how it can be claimed that "LLMs are a spectacular demolition of that premise", because LLMs must be trained on an amount of text far greater than that to what a human is exposed.

I have learned one foreign language just by being exposed to it almost daily, by watching movies spoken in that language, without using any additional means, like a dictionary or a grammar (because none were available where I lived; this was before the Internet). However, I have been helped in guessing the meaning of the words and the grammar of the language, not only by seeing what the characters of the movie were doing, correlated to the spoken phrases, but also by the fact that I knew a couple of languages that had many similarities with the language of the movies that I was watching.

In any case, the amount of the spoken language to which I had been exposed for a year or so, until becoming fluent in it, had been many orders of magnitudes less than what is used by a LLM for training.

I do not know whether any innate knowledge of some grammar was involved, but certainly the knowledge of the grammar of other languages had helped tremendously in reducing the need for being exposed to greater amounts of text, because after seeing only a few examples I could guess the generally-applicable grammar rules.

There is no doubt that the way by which a LLM learns is much dumber than how a human learns, which is why this must be compensated by a much bigger amount of training data.

Seeing how the current inefficiency of LLM training has already caused serious problems for a great number of people, who either had to give up on buying various kinds of electronic devices or they had to accept to buy devices of a much worse quality than previously desired and planned, because the prices for DRAM modules and for big SSDs have skyrocketed, due to the hoarding of memory devices by the rich who hope to become richer by using LLMs, I believe that it has been proven beyond doubt that the way how LLMs learn, for now, is not good enough and it is certainly not a positive achievement, as more people have been hurt by it than the people who have benefited from it.

[chrisjj]

> "stochastic parrot" was coined before ChatGPT.

But not before LLMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot

[chrisjj]

> it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory.

Rehashing text in a language is not mastering that language, and no, is not feared by linguists.