BERT, GPT-3, Timnit Gebru and us
The deployment of automated semantic models, such as Google’s BERT or OpenAI’s GPT-3, poses a serious challenge to hermeneutics and its centrality to the social sciences. Artificial intelligence is indeed conquering language. The technological advances associated with deep learning and the modi operandi of interpreting machines force us to seriously consider the possibilities and power of such models. More understanding is needed about the type of automated “comprehension” advanced by these models and how their calculations of probability, variation and threshold, for example, can vector language and render it as a form of “parroting.” In this paper and to this end, we examine Google’s dismissal of the researcher Timnit Gebru following the publication of “On the Danger of Stochastic Parrots,” to demonstrate how the value of automated language processing stems as much from the world it puts forward as from its reference to a specific context. Finally, this should allow us to circumscribe the economic, political and ethical aporias around these models, including the fact that the platforms developing them fail to consider the way in which they proceed by extracting and instrumentalizing meaning. In essence, it is the intimate relationship between meaning and the displacement of centres of power that is fundamental to Critical AI Studies and their evolution.