The people saying "it's just a stochastic parrot" were saying that because they thought the fact that it works by modelling the statistics of words and predicting the next most likely one meant that it would never be capable of anything sophisticated or any kind of novel output. It was just parroting things that already existed in a random way.
There was never any actual foundation for that belief, and it has been proven wrong empirically by more capable models, which is why you don't hear people saying it much any more.
There was never any actual foundation for that belief, and it has been proven wrong empirically by more capable models, which is why you don't hear people saying it much any more.