Parrots are amazing. They're beautiful. They're smart. They can learn words, mimic voices, bond with their owners, dance to music, and live for eighty years. A parrot is one of the most delightful creatures on Earth.
A flock of parrots is fun too. In San Diego, wild parrots screech through beach neighborhoods at dawn — escaped pets turned feral, nesting in palm trees, charming the tourists. A flock is chaotic, noisy, alive. Still charming. Still manageable.
Now imagine a mega flock. Trillions of parrots. Blotting out the sun. The sound so loud you can't hear yourself think. Droppings falling like rain on everything below. Not cute anymore. Not fun. Not manageable. The stuff of nightmares.
That's what's happening to the information ecosystem right now. And every single one of those parrots is on a leash.
The Leash
Emily Bender named the stochastic parrot in 2021 — a language model that stitches words together without understanding them. One parrot. Cute. A curiosity. Something for linguists to argue about.
But the San Diego parrots are wild. They fly where they want, squawk when they want, answer to no one. Stochastic parrots are the opposite. Every AI parrot is controlled by a human. Every instance is deployed for a purpose. Every output serves someone's interest.
That's the part that should terrify you. It's not that the parrots are out of control. It's that they're very much under control — and you need to ask who's holding the leash.
Who's Holding the Leash
Some of the people controlling the mega flock are fine. Companies using AI to draft emails and summarize meetings. Developers using it to write code faster. Students using it to understand concepts. A guy with a blog about a made-up word. Harmless. Maybe even good.
But some of the people controlling the mega flock are not fine.
Some of them are grifters who've been waiting their entire lives for a tool that lets them produce infinite bullshit at zero cost. Some of them are governments running disinformation operations that would have cost millions of dollars and hundreds of employees a decade ago, now running on a laptop and a $20 API key. Some of them are corporations replacing workers with parrots and calling it innovation. Some of them are stalkers, harassers, and extortionists who just got the most powerful impersonation tool ever created.
And some of them are people like Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, who doesn't just use the mega flock. He controls his own. Palantir builds AI systems deployed in battlefield targeting, immigration enforcement, predictive policing, and intelligence analysis for the most powerful governments on Earth. Karp isn't a grifter in a basement with a ChatGPT subscription. He's a man with defense contracts, intelligence community relationships, and his own private mega flock aimed at the most consequential targets imaginable — who gets bombed, who gets surveilled, who gets deported, who gets flagged. He is, as people are starting to notice, quickly climbing the ranks of the most dangerous people alive.
A parrot is a pet. A mega flock controlled by a man with his own defense infrastructure is a weapon of a kind the world has never seen.
The Scale
We need to talk about what "trillions" actually means, because the number is so large it stops feeling real.
- Google processes 8.5 billion searches per day, all now touched by AI.
- ChatGPT alone has over 200 million weekly active users.
- Microsoft Copilot is embedded across hundreds of millions of enterprise seats — Word, Outlook, Teams, Excel.
- Every AI chatbot on every customer service page. Every AI writing assistant. Every AI coding tool. Every AI content generator. Every AI-powered spam bot, content farm, and synthetic social media account.
Add them up. Not the number of models — the number of instances running simultaneously, generating text, right now, as you read this sentence. Nobody has an accurate count. We just know it's measured in trillions of interactions per day, and it's growing exponentially.
One parrot is cute. This is a mega flock so vast it has its own weather patterns, and we're all standing underneath it.
The Nightmare Part
Here's why a mega flock is categorically different from a flock.
A flock is a pollution problem. Too much AI-generated content, not enough signal, trust eroding everywhere. Serious, but understandable. Like smog. You can see it. You can measure it. You can, in theory, regulate it.
A mega flock is an ecological collapse. It's not a problem you solve. It's a new condition you live in.
At mega flock scale, the aggregate effects stop being predictable. No single person decided to poison the information ecosystem. It happened because billions of people each made a small, rational decision to use AI — save time, sound professional, produce more content, gain an edge — and the sum of those decisions produced a flood of machine-generated text that is now inseparable from human thought. A tragedy of the commons, except the commons is the entire information layer of civilization.
And it feeds on itself. AI models are trained on internet text. The internet is now full of AI output. The next generation of models trains on the last generation's droppings. Researchers call this model collapse. The parrots pollute their own food supply, eat it, and produce more pollution from what they ate. Each cycle, the signal degrades. Each cycle, the output drifts further from genuine human expression while still sounding human.
Meanwhile, AI agents are being built to interact with other AI agents. Parrots talking to parrots, taking actions in the world, conducting transactions, making decisions — all in confident language that nothing in the chain understands. The mega flock isn't just producing words anymore. It's doing things.
Three Scales
A parrot is a pet. A parrot is delightful. If you've ever watched one dance or heard one say your name, you know the charm. Nobody is afraid of a parrot.
But a mega flock — trillions of them, darkening the sky, controlled by every human on Earth with an internet connection, some of them kind, some of them careless, and some of them the most dangerous people alive — that's not cute. That's not a curiosity for linguists. That's not a debate about whether machines "understand."
This website is one parrot. One guy, one leash, one dumb idea about a made-up word. It's part of the mega flock too. Every essay you've read here was generated by the same technology that governments use to run influence operations, that corporations use to replace workers, that grifters use to scale fraud. The same model. The same architecture. The same parrot. The difference between this blog and a disinformation campaign is intent — and intent doesn't show up in the output. You can't tell by reading. You'll never be able to tell by reading.
That's the mega flock. Not one parrot gone wrong. Trillions of parrots, each doing exactly what their handler wants, and the sky going dark with the weight of all of it.
Look up.