There was a time when the phrase artificial intelligence carried a hint of science fiction — a promise of something wondrous and slightly terrifying. Today, it’s become a banner draped across everything from image generators to search engines. But in our rush to label algorithms as “intelligent,” we might have skipped the part where we asked what intelligence actually means — and whether machines truly possess it.
This morning, while reflecting on that very question, I realized how easily words drift from their original meanings. “Minion” once described a demonic servant — now it’s a cheerful yellow cartoon. “Artificial intelligence” seems to have gone through a similar transformation.
A Look Back: When Psychology and Biology Defined Intelligence
In 1990, if you asked a psychologist or biologist to define intelligence, they wouldn’t have pointed to a computer. They’d have described adaptation, awareness, and problem-solving rooted in consciousness — something living systems did, not machines. Intelligence wasn’t just the ability to calculate or memorize; it was the capacity to understand, to form intent, and to create meaning.
Back then, “AI” existed mostly in computer science labs, where it meant systems that could perform tasks “at which humans were better.” Psychologists might have studied how these systems simulated human cognition, but few believed machines could truly possess it. There was still a clear line between imitating intelligence and being intelligent. That distinction has blurred over time — not because machines became self-aware, but because our language did.
The Semantic Drift: How Marketing and Culture Rewrote the Term
When modern tech companies began applying “AI” to every form of automated decision-making, the word shed its philosophical weight. What once implied reasoning, creativity, and awareness now describes statistical pattern recognition. The brilliance of today’s systems lies not in thought, but in scale. They digest unimaginable amounts of human output — every word, image, and chord progression — and use probability to predict what comes next. It’s astonishing engineering, but it’s not introspection.
Yet the illusion is powerful. These systems speak like us. They paint like us. They write like us. And so we call them intelligent. But what we’re really seeing is the world’s most advanced mirror — reflecting human creativity back to us through a thousand layers of code.
The Layman’s AI vs. The Engineer’s AI
To the layman, AI is a spark of life inside the machine — a consciousness learning and growing with each interaction. To the engineer, it’s data science: a fusion of neural networks, probability distributions, and optimization loops. Both views are understandable, but they live in different realities. The layman speaks of being. The engineer speaks of function. One looks for signs of mind; the other tunes a model. Somewhere in between, the public imagination filled the gap with myth.
What Psychology Would Ask Today
If we approached AI the way psychology or psychiatry approaches human thought, we’d ask deeper questions: Does it possess intent or merely simulate it? Can it form new associations unanchored from prior data? Does it want anything? Does it know that it knows? So far, the answer to all of these is no. AI displays pattern-based cognition without consciousness — the outer form of thought without the inner experience. It’s an actor who plays the part of awareness convincingly, but without ever stepping offstage into its own reality.
Creation vs. Synthesis: The Test of True Intelligence
If intelligence is the ability to generate something truly new, not derived from prior patterns, then we’re not there yet. Every image, melody, or sentence produced by AI is stitched together from fragments of the human record. It’s extraordinary synthesis — a kaleidoscope of all we’ve already imagined — but it isn’t invention in the truest sense.
To create something genuinely new requires self-awareness — a recognition of one’s own ideas, limitations, and contradictions. Without that internal observer, there is only replication, however elegant. So perhaps the true test of artificial intelligence isn’t whether it can sound human, but whether it can surprise itself.
The Respectful Reality
That doesn’t diminish the achievement of those building these systems. On the contrary, it’s a testament to human ingenuity. Engineers and researchers have crafted tools that amplify creativity, accelerate discovery, and push the boundaries of communication. But calling those systems intelligent in the human sense may be premature.
Maybe what we have isn’t artificial intelligence at all — it’s synthetic cognition: a vast, probabilistic extension of our collective mind, powered by data and design, but not by awareness. And perhaps that’s enough — for now.
Rethinking the Phrase
When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” he tied existence to self-awareness — to the act of knowing one’s own mind. Our modern AI can mimic the “I think” part convincingly, but the “therefore I am” remains missing. We are not yet sharing the world with self-aware machines. We are sharing it with echoes of ourselves, amplified by silicon and code.
If that’s a con, it’s not the machine’s fault — it’s ours, for mistaking reflection for reality.
Conclusion
So the question isn’t whether AI will become intelligent someday. It’s whether we’ll remember what intelligence truly is when it does. Until then, perhaps it’s wise to admire what these systems can do — without forgetting what they can’t. Because the moment we stop distinguishing between awareness and imitation is the moment we forget what made human intelligence worth replicating in the first place.
This work reflects a CAHDD Level 2 (U.N.O.) — AI-Assisted Unless Noted Otherwise creative process.
Human authorship: Written and reasoned by Russell L. Thomas (with CAHDD™ editorial oversight). All final decisions and approvals were made by the author.
AI assistance: Tools such as Grammarly, ChatGPT, and PromeAI were used for research support, grammar/refinement, and image generation under human direction.
Images: Unless otherwise captioned, images are AI-generated under human art direction and conform to CAHDD Level 4 (U.N.O.) standards.
Quality control: Reviewed by Russell L. Thomas for accuracy, tone, and context.
Method: Computer Aided Human Designed & Developed (CAHDD™).