Drew KadelMy daughter, who has had a degree in computer science for 25 years, posted this observation about ChatGPT on Facebook. It's the best description I've seen:
Nate Gaylinn@DrewKadel Love this. We want so badly for ChatGPT to produce answers, opinions, and art, but all it can do is make plausible simulations of those things. As a species, we've never had to deal with that before.
Ryan Egesdahl 
@ngaylinn @DrewKadel This is why I’m so tired of people calling machine learning “AI”. True AI doesn’t exist, and even if it did, there’s no reason to believe we can or should use it as a tool. ChatGPT is machine learning being used outside of its useful domain and media hyping it beyond credibility.
@deriamis @ngaylinn The "AI" label is misleading, but I'm pretty confident that we will never get to true Artificial General Intelligence - this is only a mirage of being close. It might well be that it could be enhanced to parse questions & redirect queries to best tools & use its LLM to make it sound smooth & chatty, or something like that- so that you'd have a generally useful & accurate research assistant, but not artificial intelligence. We may be stuck with the label however.
@DrewKadel @ngaylinn I suppose I should clarify that I think there exist strong and weak definitions of AI. The strong definition is the one to which you refer, and even if we somehow achieve it, there are moral and ethical concerns surrounding employing it as a tool. The weak definition is just ever more sophisticated ML with no sapience. AI is a “close enough” label where the distinction makes no difference. My point is that it clearly does for how ChatGPT is often being used.