Stochastic parrot
Article
Stochastic parrot is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 27, 2023 and March 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Stochastic parrot. Squawk. Squawk”; “people in the stochastic parrot faction say that AIs can’t be doing anything like humans”. It most often appears alongside Air, Alan Serzynski, Albany.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: March 27, 2023
- Last seen: March 16, 2026
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Air (1 shared issues)
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- Alan Serzynski (1 shared issues)
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- Albany (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- AnswerBot (1 shared issues)
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- AnswerBot v 1.6 (1 shared issues)
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- Arizona (1 shared issues)
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- Bellingham (1 shared issues)
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- Brightly Corporation (1 shared issues)
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- cotton gin (1 shared issues)
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- Devil (1 shared issues)
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- Dr. Andrea Mann (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
AIR: It’s a turn of phrase. Any human might use it. Any language model might copy it. Stochastic parrot. Squawk. Squawk.
Why does this matter? I often see people in the stochastic parrot faction say that AIs can’t be doing anything like humans, because they have this bizarre inhuman failure mode, “hallucinations” which is incompatible with being a normal mind that has some idea what’s going on. Therefore, it must be some kind of blind pattern-matching algorithm. Calling them “shameless guesses” hammers in that the AI is doing something so human and natural that you probably did it yourself during your student days.
Inline links: stochastic parrot