alt Hacker News> 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?
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> "stochastic parrot" was coined before ChatGPT.
But not before LLMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
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.