Cognitive Romanticism: Humans Are Worse than Stochastic Parrots!

Most Humans Are Stochastic Parrots, and LLMs Reveal Our Intellectual Mediocrity. While critics often dismiss large language models (LLMs) as mere "stochastic parrots," I argue that this accusation misunderstands both machine intelligence and, more importantly, human cognition itself. Most human thought is not creative, critical, or unpredictable; it is rote, imitative, and driven by deeply ingrained social, religious, and cognitive biases. The dominance of myth, ideology, and irrational belief systems across cultures reveals that humans themselves function largely as stochastic parrots — endlessly repeating patterns they neither question nor understand. Rather than exposing the limitations of artificial intelligence, LLMs expose the uncomfortable truth about human intellectual mediocrity. In this talk, I will attack the myth of human cognitive exceptionalism, dismantle the romantic notions attached to human "creativity" and "autonomy," and propose a radical redefinition of intelligence beyond humanist illusions. Intelligence, whether in biological or artificial systems, must be seen not as the privilege of a superior species, but as an emergent property of patterned interaction with environments — often stochastic, occasionally innovative, but rarely transcendental.