Machines, Medium and Meaning: Exploring Boundaries of AI in Understanding Meaning

The advancement of Artificial Intelligence has sparked an argument about its ability to understand the subtleties of human language and meaning. This paper explores AI’s linguistic and semantic competence from philosophical and technical perspectives. In tandem with this fundamental question: whether AI truly understands meaning? Others are: what are the current capabilities of AI? How is contemporary AI constrained in terms of comprehension? And what are the possibilities related to enhancing their understanding? The research stems out of these queries and is underpinned by linguistic philosophy, cognitive science and machine learning. While current AI with remarkable linguistic competence can model human language, it understands only form not content because of its constraints in embodiment, context-sensitivity and intentionality. However, future research directions offer possibilities for enhanced AI’s understanding of meaning.