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Ryan Leack, Assistant Professor of Writing, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Can AI think – and should it? What it means to think, from Plato to ChatGPT

Ancient Greek concepts about intelligence can shed light on 21st-century tech they never knew. agsandrew/iStock via Getty Images Plus

In my writing and rhetoric courses, students have plenty of opinions on whether AI is intelligent: how well it can assess, analyze, evaluate and communicate information.

When I ask whether artificial intelligence can “think,” however, I often look upon a sea of blank faces. What is “thinking,” and how is it the same or different from “intelligence”?

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