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Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT, the internet has been awash in synthetic text, with suggested applications including robo-lawyers, robo-therapists, and robo-journalists. I will overview how language models work and why they can seem to be using language meaningfully-despite only modeling the distribution of word forms. This leads into a discussion of the risks we identified in the Stochastic Parrots paper (Bender, Gebru et al 2021) and how they are playing out in the era of ChatGPT. Finally, I will explore what must hold for an appropriate use case for text synthesis.