Even people like Jurgen Habermas don't really know what they mean when they say "meaning", it's one of the most problematic concepts in all of philosophy.
Humans read stuff and think they understood the "meaning" but they really didn't. If you don't believe me, try grading a quiz.
In the case of A.I. engineering a very useful form of "understanding" is a decomposition into facts. For instance if an A.I. read an article about a sports game it ought to be able to generate a database entry saying who played, where, who won, what the score is, etc.
It sounds very easy but this kind of information extraction is preparadigmatic and I know because I've tried to build this kind of system. LLMs beat older system at it but that's because older systems fail at it completely.
In the case of the game, for instance, simple pattern matching falls down for quite a few reason, not least that a good account of a game will probably give the same facts for the last game that team A played and the last game that team B played and also the last game A and B played, not to mention league standing information that might superficially look like the score of a game.
That kind of "meaning" is explicitly allowed to be copied under copyright law, see
The fact that Jurgen doesn't know doesn't help your argument, you're the one creating the identity to apply the same laws in the same way, and if you don't know about some relevant property of human brain activity, you can't make a claim that it's identical to whatever AI is doing.
Humans read stuff and think they understood the "meaning" but they really didn't. If you don't believe me, try grading a quiz.
In the case of A.I. engineering a very useful form of "understanding" is a decomposition into facts. For instance if an A.I. read an article about a sports game it ought to be able to generate a database entry saying who played, where, who won, what the score is, etc.
It sounds very easy but this kind of information extraction is preparadigmatic and I know because I've tried to build this kind of system. LLMs beat older system at it but that's because older systems fail at it completely.
In the case of the game, for instance, simple pattern matching falls down for quite a few reason, not least that a good account of a game will probably give the same facts for the last game that team A played and the last game that team B played and also the last game A and B played, not to mention league standing information that might superficially look like the score of a game.
That kind of "meaning" is explicitly allowed to be copied under copyright law, see
https://libraries.emory.edu/research/copyright/copyright-dat...