There's this new trend of what I'll dub techno-nihilism, which is essentially a counterargument to the stochastic parrot argument. The former being: well what if WE are stochastic parrots, after all that's how we learn, right? Well yes, but actually no.

It's trivially false because ChatGPT was trained on something (in this case, Stack Overflow), which, in turn was trained on something else (maybe a book), and so on. So knowledge, imagination, and genuine creativity must exist somewehere down that chain. Everything can't be just repeating what was learned prior ad infinitum, or we'd have nothing new. Ironically, even the development of large language models is an exercise in creativity.