LLMs are not stochastic parrots: Evidence for meaning-mediated abstraction from conlang-like tasks

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.34187v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The strong version of the stochastic parrot argument claims that, although large language models (LLMs) may exceed rote regurgitation, they cannot move beyond statistical pattern matching into abstraction or reasoning, remaining ontologically near the lower bound of pattern reuse despite producing alluringly fluent text. We test this hypothesis using conlang-like tasks. Several LLMs are given only natural-language descriptions of fictiona