Is AI a stochastic parrot?

There’s a well-known phrase that AI is not true intelligence, but just a “stochastic parrot”. But human beings do quite a bit of parroting in conversation, as it turns out. So maybe the comparison is a little more complicated.

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I found this phrase thought-provoking. We all parrot what we hear from others. Perhaps most of our conversations are parroting what we may have learned from someone else. AI is just a sophisticated parrot because it can search through more work than we can. AI, like us, does this with noise. It is a stochastic process. 

So what makes us or AI more than a parrot? The difference is what we can call creativity. It is rephrasing or making extensions or narratives that are not just a repeat of what we have heard before. The reordering of fact. The prioritizing of data is a part of the creative process. This is done by AI, so it is more than just parroting with noise. However, we should be aware that AI is creating something new through this reordering. If we ask the questions differently or use a different algorithm, we will create something different.