A case study in parrot misalignment: When we first got her, sometimes she'd get scared of new toys or other unfamiliar objects and we would reassure her with "it's ok". So now whenever she's scared of something, she says "it's ok" over and over while rapidly backing away from it.

I see this post has escaped containment, so to explain what I meant by misalignment, it's a reference to the alignment problem in artificial intelligence. I gave Ada (the parrot) some data about her environment (the words I say around specific objects). She noticed a pattern, but learned something subtly different than what I meant. Similar to how in this video, the programmers intended for the AI to learn to pick up the coin, but since the coin was always at the right of the level, the AI actually learned to walk all the way to the right, coin or no coin.

Some have suggested that she does know what "it's ok" means and is using it to reassure herself. That's possible but I think it's less likely, since that would require her to have first learned its correct meaning (which seems difficult without additional context that humans get but she doesn't). So I think the more straightforward answer is that she thinks it means "scary!". Not sure though.

And no I don't intentionally scare her frequently, we normally keep scary objects away from her and let her get used to them at her own pace. (We take advantage of this by putting the scary objects around the house in places where we don't want her to go.) I made it up to her by dancing with her afterwards.

Vygotsky. The external function of language (communication) was internalized to self-control anxiety. Happens to children all the time.

The parrot psychoanalysts have found this post

Is she also mimicking the broken smoke detector? :(

Nah, that's just one of her favorite noises. (Her favorite noises are all of the most annoying noises.) That squeak in particular she also tends to use when she's scared.

@MorlockP Is the parrot doing the chirp or do you need to change your smoke detector batteries hehe

@MorlockP That's her. :)

I've read that corvids don't really have names for each other so much as they sort of describe the relationship, I wonder if she's doing something similar

That's interesting, I didn't know that. She does it any time she's scared though, not just for one specific object. (Turns out there are a *lot* of things that are scary to a parrot.)