Can AI understand a flower without being able to touch or smell?

What is a flower, if you can't smell? The latest generation of artificial intelligence models seem to have a human-level understanding of the world, but it turns out that their lack of sensory information – and a body – places limits on how well they can comprehend concepts like a flower or humour. Qihui Xu at the Ohio State University and her colleagues asked both humans and large language models (LLMs) about their understanding of almost 4500 words – everything from "flower" and "hoof" to "humorous" and "swing." The participants and AI models were asked to rate each word for a variety of aspects, such as the level of emotional arousal they conjure up, or their links to senses and physical interaction with different parts of the body. The goal was to see how LLMs, including OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 and Google's PaLM and Gemini, compared with humans in their rankings.