We're all going to stay fixated on what exactly a "parrot" is, but the paper doesn't rest on the definition of tropical birds: it advances a specific and detailed hypothesis about how language models don't operate with communicative intent, and in fact the meaning humans obtain from LLM output is a cognitive pattern matching illusion. Those claims have not held up at all.

At this point, I think the authors are really counting on people not to read their paper.