THE CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE AND COGNITION IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MODELS – A PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

Artificial intelligence is a technology that has revolutionized numerous fields over recent decades. Its applications span scientific and engineering domains as well as everyday experiences, such as image recognition, autonomous vehicles, language translation, and medical diagnostic systems. AI systems, particularly those based on deep learning, exhibit capabilities comparable to human performance and, in some areas, even surpass it. This raises fundamental questions about their epistemic nature. Does AI genuinely generate knowledge? If so, what is the nature of this knowledge? Should we view its achievements as a form of novel cognition or merely as advanced processing of pre-existing data? A key issue thus emerges: do AI systems fulfill the criteria traditionally associated with human cognition, such as the capacity for justification, awareness of cognitive processes, or the creation of new epistemic content? This paper aims to address these questions by focusing on philosophical conceptions of knowledge and analyzing whether AI can be regarded as an autonomous cognitive agent. These considerations provide a perspective on AI not merely as a technology augmenting human cognitive processes but also as a potential step towards redefining knowledge in the technological era.