Because it's an outmoded cliche that never held much philosophical weight to begin with and doesn't advance the discussion usefully. "It's a stochastic parrot" is not a useful predictor of actual LLM capabilities and never was. Last year someone posted on HN a log of GPT-5 reverse engineering some tricky assembly code, a challenge set by another commentator as an example of "something LLMs could never do". But here we are a year later still wading through people who cannot accept that LLMs can, in a meaningful sense, "compute".

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righthand 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s entirely useful discussion because as soon as you forget that it’s not really having a conversation with you, it’s a deep dive into delusion that you’re talking to a smart robot and ignoring the fact that these smart robots were trained on a pile of mostly garbage. When I have a conversation with another human, I’m not expecting them to brute force an answer to the topic. As soon as you forget that Llms are just brute forcing token by token then people start living in fantasy land. The whole “it’s not a stochastic parrot” is just “you’re holding it wrong”.

	▲	layla5alive 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Its not that LLMs are stochastic parrots and humans are not. Its that many humans often sail through conversations stochastic parroting because they're mentally tired and "phoning it in" - so there are times when talking to the LLM, which has a higher level of knowledge, feels more fruitful on a topic than talking to a human who doesn't have the bandwidth to give you their full attention, and also lack the depth and breadth of knowledge. I can go deep on many topics with LLMs that most humans can't or won't keep up on. In the end, I'm really only talking to myself most of the time in either case, but the LLM is a more capable echo, and it doesn't tire of talking about any topic - it can dive deep into complex details, and catching its hallucinations is an exercise in itself.

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dinkumthinkum 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No. It's quite a useful thing to understand So, what, you have us believe it is a sentient, thinking, kind of digital organism and you would have us not believe that it is exactly what it is? Being wrong and being unimaginative about what can be achieved with such a "parrot" is not the same as being wrong about it be a word predictor. If you don't think, you can probably ask an LLM and it will even "admit" this fact. I do agree that it has become considered to be outmoded to question anything about the current AI Orthodox.