Google: 1. the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
                 a person or being with the ability to acquire and apply knowledge.

            2. the collection of information of military or political value.

Merriam-Webster: 1 a (1): the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations: reason  also : the skilled use of reason   (2): the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)

Wikipedia dives even deeper and includes Artificial Intelligence along with the other definitions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Intelligence is not the same as sentience or self-determination. AI has no agency in terms of motivation or drive or desire.

According to google:

Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

So, yeah, technically AI is intelligent. It 'learns', just not like humans do.

I still find it easier to think about it as a sonic screwdriver capable of whatever the plot requires.

The more AI companies demand more data to build AI models, the more obvious it becomes that there is no actual intelligence behind their AI.

It is just algorithms that are either spinning input to create the illusion that its output is new or making predictions about what word should come next based on the textual data input into it.  (Or photos, art, etc., but for just focusing on text here.)

And it may pick up on patterns we might not notice (especially where "AI" is used for problem solving situations) and thus it might seem intelligent but there's no intelligence.

If there is no intelligence, there is no learning comparable to how humans learn.

Which means that arguments that it is okay to use copyrighted material without permission or compensation for the copyright holders does not hold water because it is not learning from the material in the same or similar way to how humans learn.

Because there is no intelligence behind AI.

There is no there there.

If there were actual intelligence, you could feed the AI school textbooks in order and it would learn the material and understand the material and be able to read and write and understand and all that.

It would not need to scan hundreds of thousands of articles and books and whatnot to be functionally literate.

But there is no intelligence there.  Machine "learning" may be a form of training, but the machine never actually learns anything.  It may be trained to perform a function, but it did not learn.  It does not understand.  It may mimic learning and it may mimic understanding but that does not mean it has accomplished either.

Which means AI companies should not use material that isn't public domain or hasn't been properly licensed from the copyright holder.

In recent years NaNo has spent a lot of money and effort on young people's programs. I've never understood why, since the majority users of NaNo are always young people anyway. It's mostly teenagers writing fantasy. I applaud those efforts. If NaNo had existed when I was that age, by my twenties I would have been a legit novelist. And I would have had a long traditional publishing career as an author writing one book a year. Now I'm trying to make up for lost time.

The NaNo stuff could be its own thread. There's been so much controversy since like 2022... I think it's time for a new organization to step in and the old one to be dissolved.

My question would be why does there even need to be an organization?