Is there a difference between being a “stochastic parrot” and understanding text? No matter what you call it, an LLM will always produces the same output with the same input if it is at the same state.
An LLM will never say “I don’t know” unless it’s been trained to say “I don’t know”, it doesn’t have the concept of understanding. And so I lean on calling it a “stochastic parrot”. Although I think there is some interesting philosophic exercises, you could do on whether humans are much different and if understanding is just an illusion.