This is a false dichotomy. Artificial Intelligence is more of a marketing term type of Hi-Fi or High Definition, ie. being a “suitcase word”[1], ie. it packs various different meanings and phenomena together to the point that without explication one cannot know what we are even talking about. Content recommendation system and LLM are completely different things.

What professor Bender is trying to explain here is that they were trying to describe how the LLM’s actually operate, to which point stochastic parrots is a fairly decent term. It is only disparaging if you know absolutely nothing how LLM’s work or you have some strange affixation to chatbots and believing they are far more capable than they actually are.

[1] Coined by Marvin Minsky: https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/consciousness-is-a-big-su...