[NoGravitas]

> I disagree. The criticism is _not_ that basic building blocks cannot be combined to produce something richer. The issue is the "without any reference to meaning" part of the quoted definition from Bender in that article.

Right. People think the stochastic parrot description is about the Chinese Room thought experiment, but it's not. It's about the Thai Library thought experiment: https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-t...

[abeppu]

Thanks for pointing to that! I'm weirded out b/c this article from Bender in late May seemed so familiar. Here's a conversation from Feb in which a very similar argument is made, also using Thai text as an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34732971