Yes definitely. Many of my fellow NLP researchers would disagree with those researchers and philosophers (not sure why we should care about the latter’s opinions on LLMs).
I’m not sure what you’re saying here - do you mean you do or don’t think LLMs are “stochastic parrot”s?
In any case, the reason I would care about philosophers opinions on LLMs is mostly because LLMs are already making “the masses” think they’re potentially sentient, and or would deserve personhood. What’s more concerning is that the academics that sort of define what thinking even is seem confused by LLMs if you take the “stochastic parrot” POV. This eventually has real world affects - it might take a decade or two, but these things spread.
I think this is a crazy idea right now, but I also think that going into the future eventually we’ll need to have something like a TNG “Measure of a Man” trial about some AI, and I’d want to get that sort of thing right.