Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human and AI Intelligence in Social Realities

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence, particularly since November 2022, has reshaped the ways humans interact with technology in everyday life, education, and the workplace. As AI systems increasingly play a more dominant role in text generation, engage in conversation, assist in creative work, and simulate human behavior, the distinction between human and artificial intelligence becomes more complex. <br/>A key debate in this context is how intelligence and sentience manifest in human-AI contexts—not as fixed properties of either humans or machines, but as relational and context-dependent phenomena. When users engage with AI-generated (or enhanced) text, chatbots, voice assistants, or humanoid robots, they often attribute intelligence, expertise and even sentience to these systems, even though AI operates on probabilistic modeling rather than human understanding or self-awareness. So what does it mean to perceive an AI system as intelligent? Under what conditions do users understand AI-output and behavior as intelligent, expertly, sentient or socially competent?<br/>The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines intelligence as “the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations” and “the skilled use of reason.” Sentience, by contrast, refers to a person’s ability to sense and feel: “being conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling.” These qualities are deeply tied to social activities and the ability to engage in shared sense-making. Henceforth, we therefore treat intelligence and sentience as interdependent phenomena that emerge through sense-making activities, rather than intrinsic traits of humans or AI systems.<br/>In computer science, intelligence is understood in terms of computation. AI does not “understand” meaning in a human sense but produces outputs based on probabilistic models, data patterns, and algorithmic rules. Nevertheless, users often interpret AI outputs as intelligent, meaningful, responsive, or even sentient. This raises critical questions about the mechanisms through which AI-human sense-making activities shape our perceptions of intelligence and sentience.<br/>As Stultz (2024, p. 253) notes, intelligence is inherently subjective, shaped by social expectations and individual experiences. This panel explores the notions of intelligence and sentience from diverse interdisciplinary perspectives, focusing on AI-mediated user experiences across multiple domains. Contributions will examine AI’s role in text production, speech-sound processing (voice interfaces), digital conversations (chatbots), and variants of human-robot interactions (humanoid robots,), and AI.<br/>With an interdisciplinary approach, we aim to refine our critical understanding of intelligence and sentience—both from human perspectives and the lens of specialized AI systems. <br/>