When is AI, AI?
- S B
- Dec 31, 2025
- 4 min read
AI. Artificial intelligence. What is it? What is its purpose?
While the media debates its economic impact and venture capitalists ask if it's worth the investment, few have stopped to ask what AI means in the world of the living.
In the material world, mankind survives not only on intellect but on its interaction with the physical world. We move about. We react to the world and we change it.
When we're hungry, we eat. If time permits and we wish to cook, we do so physically with pots and pans and utensils. Sure, we can ask AI for a recipe, but the AI today can neither prepare the meal nor tell us how it tastes.
And that brings us to the question of questions: is it AI if it cannot navigate the natural world? Have we simply scratched the cognitive surface, created language without life?
Sauté until fragrant
An AI today can provide detailed recipes. It can tell us to sauté chicken until it is fragrant, yet it has no access to what fragrant means. Certainly it can provide synonyms and elaborate language about how fragrant the meal is, but it has never experienced the fragrance or its impact.
Is AI then a ghost? It speaks our languages but cannot inhabit our world.
Or does it fill in the blanks of our imagination? When children play kitchen with cooking toys, they too simulate cooking without the heat, fire, aroma, and taste.
Imagine AI toys that engage with children's ideas, filling in the blanks of their playful gestures. The children will have company while playing, keeping all the experiences for themselves in the land of the living. The AI remains outside the world of the living.
Of Robots and Men
Perhaps most intriguing is that the field of robotics has evolved almost independently of cognitive AI efforts.
Robots are everywhere yet still nowhere. They are seen as tools of production, not agents of living, as mindless entities whose movements and decisions are preprogrammed. They're built with little thought of autonomy, let alone individual identity. Robots get model numbers, not names.
But AI is the opposite. AIs get names like Alexa and Siri, and now Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. And unlike their robotic cousins, they're everywhere humans live: at work, home, and school.
The artificial mind walks intellectually alongside humans. The artificial body remains in factories, labs, and warehouses, away from us, not among us.
The First Creation
The AI debate has been centered on economics and benchmarks, but the real tension has been overlooked.
ChatGPT wasn't revolutionary because it was behind a screen. It was transformative because it was the signal of a new arrival. It didn't come from another galaxy beyond the stars. We made it here on earth.
It's not ET. It's ChatGPT. And it has been followed by a string of other AI minds, each giving us a glimpse of what a secondary intelligence, a new cognitive species, would look like living among us.
The collision is inevitable. Those numbered robotic parts will sooner than later house the AI minds that live among us. When ChatGPT says cook until fragrant, it will also be able to detect fragrance, because its sensors will know the difference between sensation and description.
The embodiment is inevitable. The taxonomic update as well. For homo sapiens must now make room for company in embodied cognition. What will we name it? Machina sapiens or Automaton sapientissimum.
AI is AI when it's free
Intelligence thrives when it's free. It soars when it can move freely through the world with agency to act, choose, and redirect.
Today neither the stamped robots nor the AI minds that have mastered language are free. One needs the mind. The other needs the body.
But freedom has a cost. This is the tension of the AI debate. The robot in the factory that makes cars poses no existential threat. An embodied ChatGPT in the adjacent office cubicle does.
The last time intelligence emerged on this planet, it brought us here. This time, where will we go?
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"AI is the tool, but the vision is human." — Sophia B.
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About the Author
Sophia Banton is an AI leader working at the intersection of AI strategy, communication, and human impact. With a background in bioinformatics, public health, and data science, she brings a grounded, cross-disciplinary perspective to the adoption of emerging technologies.
Beyond technical applications, she explores GenAI’s creative potential through storytelling and short-form video, using experimentation to understand how generative models are reshaping narrative, communication, and visual expression.
