Can AI think – and should it? What it means to think, from Plato to ChatGPT

By Ryan Leack, Assistant Professor of Writing, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

In my writing and rhetoric courses, students have plenty of opinions on whether AI is intelligent: how well it can assess, analyze, evaluate and communicate information.

When I ask whether artificial intelligence can “think,” however, I often look upon a sea of blank faces. What is “thinking,” and how is it the same or different from “intelligence”?

We might treat the two as more or less synonymous, but philosophers have marked nuances for millennia. Greek philosophers may not have known about 21st-century…

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