What would be your definition of intelligence if an chatgpt is not intelligence?
My definition would be something along the lines of the ability to use knowledge, ideas and concepts to solve a particular problem. For example if you ask “what should I do if I see a black bear approaching?” Both you and chatgpt would answer the question by using the knowledge that black bears can be scared off to come to the solution “make yourself look big and yell”
The only difference is the type of knowledge available. People can have experiential knowledge, eg. You saw a guy scare off a bear one time by yelling and waving their arms. Chatgpt doesn’t have that because it doesn’t have experiences. It does have contextual knowledge like us, you read or heard from someone that you can scare off a bear. This type of knowledge though is inherently probabilistic, the person who told you could always be giving false information. That doesn’t make you unintelligent for using it though and it doesn’t mean you don’t understand accuracy if it turns out to be false, it’s just that your brain made a guess that it was true that was wrong.
You could make the same case for you not understanding anything outside of your experiential knowledge. You are only able to name COVID variants because you read/heard about them somewhere. Fundamentally any idea outside of your experience is just a nexus of linked concepts in your head. For example COVID omicron is a combination of your concept of COVID along with an idea of it being a mutation/variant and it being more contagious maybe added in with a couple other facts you read about it. This linking of ideas forms your understanding and chatgpt is able to form these connections just as well as a person. Unless you want to make a case that understanding necessitates experience chatgpt understands a lot about the world. If you make that case though then you don’t understand evolution, microbiology, history etc. anything that you just read about in your training data.