The Quest for Genuine Artificial Intelligence:

What Are We Looking For?

Abstract

The rise of ChatGPT and various other publicly available AI chatbots has brought the discussion regarding AI to the forefront of academic and public discourse. Yet when it comes to the most important question: how genuinely intelligent, or human-like can AI be, it seems that many philosophers are satisfied with the answers given in the past century. The essay surveys some philosophical visions of what (artificial) intelligence and consciousness are, prominent in the past century. This work contends that rapid advancements in AI demand that those in the field of philosophy of mind place their bets with all the seriousness that goes together with expecting real answers. The paper also attempts to provide new, original answers to the question of what would make AI ‘genuine’ or ‘human-like’, and analyse which features of the human mind are necessary to conclude that their owner is “genuinely intelligent”. Consequently, the nature and importance of an open phenomenology are highlighted, and the paper advocates for the acceptance of a form of realism about the world, coupled with a Putnam-style externalism. The combination of these frameworks aims to provide one with a list of conditions that guarantee the emergence of a genuine artificial mind. Situated within the journal’s science–faith dialogue and the thematic focus on religion and ethics, the proposed criteria also clarify when claims about AI’s moral status – and theological concerns about human distinctiveness (e.g., imago Dei) – are philosophically warranted.