Let’s check in on two of our old friends in the critical history of artificial intelligences. What’s the status of the torment nexus today? And how are those stochastic parrots? This talk will provide an update on AI projects that continue to abuse their science fiction namesakes (RIP the Metaverse & Horizon Worlds), and reevaluate the major claims of the 2021 paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots”, including what they got wrong (water, parrot intelligence, etc.), what issues are still as relevant as ever (data provenance, data bias, energy usage; limits of scaling), and what they didn’t really address (speculative finance, hyperscaler monopoly).

Zac Zimmer is an associate professor in the literature department at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature, culture, and technology in the hemispheric Americas, and teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics, technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. He is the author of First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (2025). In addition to his current research on the infrastructure of techno-systems, he co-facilitates the Ethics and Astrobiology reading group, part of the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Astrobiology Initiative. Recent open access publications on artificial intelligence include “Outlier and Collapse: The Enron Corpus and Foundation Model Training Data” and “El ingenio de la inteligencia (The Knowledge Mill)“.

This event is presented by The Humanities Institute’s ± AI Initiative