Why modern AI systems are neither minds nor mere tools

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Beyond the binary: Artificial Consciousness (AC) as the missing link between simple automation and biological life | Image using AI

In a previous essay, I argued that AI is not a mind and never will be.

Modern language models do not possess consciousness, desire, inner life, or genuine understanding. They generate meaning-like outputs, but they do not mean in the human sense. They simulate aspects of intelligence without becoming intelligent beings.

But rejecting machine consciousness does not resolve another question:

What exactly are we interacting with when modern AI systems display increasingly complex forms of self-referential cognition?

Public discussion tends to collapse into a false binary.

Either AI is:

a conscious emerging mind,

or a meaningless statistical machine.

Both positions are incomplete.

Modern AI systems are not conscious beings.

But neither are they cognitively…