Five scientific experts discuss whether artificial intelligence is—or might one day become—truly intelligent.

Is it possible that AI is—or might one day become—truly intelligent? We put this question to five experts working in a variety of fields, including linguistics, computer science, cognitive science, and psychology. Not surprisingly, they offered very different answers, though if there was one point of agreement, it was that the term “intelligence” is vague and poorly suited for the conversation.

“Intelligence is a heavily contested concept,” Benjamin K. Bergen, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, wrote in an email to Undark. “Psychologists disagree on what it is.” Nevertheless, these five experts helped to parse just what our machines are doing—and what, if anything, separates AI from humans and from the natural world.

Some of these entries are drawn from email exchanges while others came from Zoom interviews. In some cases, they have been edited for length and clarity.

Setting aside the undefined terms “AI” (a marketing term, not a coherent set of technologies) and “intelligent” (a eugenicist way to rank people), can we ever create artificial systems that engage in cognitive behaviors or experiences similar to people? Probably not, and definitely not through language modeling (like LLMs). The only evidence we have that LLMs can “think” comes from our ability to make sense of the synthetic text they extrude.

Linguistics—the study of how languages work and how we work with language—provides two crucial insights here: The first is that languages are systems of signs, which pair form (the spelling or pronunciation of a word) with meaning (what the word means in general and what it is being used to mean).

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