Risa

The intended design of a system is not a basis for judgment of the system's capacity. If something has emergent behavior, it will exceed its stated goals. The whole episode "The Quality of Life" is about that. It's also pretty clear that LLMs have exceeded what the designers thought they could do.

Does the lack of autonomy of current AI make it not conscious in your view? Why?

Just to be more annoying.

Definitions of words change over time. "Car" started as a short form of 'chariot' and meant something being pulled. We had train cars long before we had automobiles.

I actually do think that, to a decent extent, I understand what AI is. And while this is a technicality, it really grinds my gears when a GPT model is compared to an autocomplete/predictive text. Yes, they both technically just predict text using statistical models, but it's like comparing a modern jet to a paper airplane, because they both can fly.

[ChatGPT] has no idea what its words mean

Doesn't it tho? It has an internal model of the world that it constructed by reading and processing tons of text. It knows that an apple is round-ish, comes in certain colors, can be eaten or grow into a tree. That knowledge is very limited due to the model's inability to experience such things as shape or color; like a blind person knows the description of "red", but doesn't actually know what it is.
Of course, it's debatable whether what a GPT model does can be considered "understanding", but then again, we don't really know what understanding IS, but I would argue it's extremely close to what a human understanding is, albeit in a limited scope.

That being said, I think the discussion of how advanced (or not) our modern AI systems are, though interesting, is extraneous to the question at hand. The main question is "what is AI?". From your comment, I can conclude that your definition of AI relies on the subject's possession of sentience/consciousness. I think this is a flawed approach because a bee, while undoubtedly possessing rudimentary intelligence, in all likelihood, lacks consciousness. So consciousness should not be a qualifying criteria for an AI. Furthermore, I looked up several dictionaries for definitions of "AI", and they all boil down to "man-made machines that perform human tasks", here's are some:

• Cambridge Dictionary – "computer technology that allows something to be done in a way that is similar to the way a human would do it"
• Merriam-Webster – "the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior".

In conclusion, intelligence comes in all shapes and sizes; the only thing differentiating natural intelligence from artificial intelligence is the origin, i.e., if it was man-made, it's artificial. By that definition, perhaps outdated and lacking insight, Data most definitely possesses AI. Not to mention the lack of full-fledged "sentience" as he can't experience feelings.