AI tools produce dazzling results – but do they really have ‘intelligence’?

If algorithms can produce dazzling results of the kind we see from ChatGPT without being intelligent, what is real intelligence?

We might say intelligence is insight: the judgement that something is or is not a good idea. Think of Archimedes, leaping from his bath and shouting “Eureka” because he had had an insight into the principle of buoyancy.

Generative AI doesn’t have insight. ChatGPT can’t tell you if its answer to a question is better than Gemini’s. (Gemini, until recently known as Bard, is Google’s competitor to OpenAI’s GPT family of AI tools.)

Or to put it another way: generative AI might produce amazing pictures in the style of Monet, but if it were trained only on Renaissance art it would never invent Impressionism.