Ah, I see. So when an AI imitates the things it was trained off of it's simply parroting the material. But when we imitate things we've trained off of, we're synthesizing new information that we've learned from. /s
This ambiguity is exactly what OP sounds like they're talking about in regards to intelligence. Who's to say what parroting is and what synthesizing new information from old ideas is? Where is the line? Can we score how "parroty" an idea is? Can we quantify how much intelligence is imbued in a written statement? There is no firm science (that I know of) that quantifies intelligence, but it sounds like we'll be needing to determine hard metrics to find out if AI is truly intelligent or not. Otherwise, we'll have these circular arguments forever that basically dismiss an AI as being intelligent simply because it's an AI.
Well, having started in 1955, we really must frame that "infancy" in a scale like dog-years, human-years, AI-years...
> that it must outperform humans in the ability to be ... accurate
No, the expectation of some of us was not about «outperform[ing]», but about not losing the focus of «accura[cy]».
> a matter of degree
It does not seem a «matter of degree» but its opposite, a "matter of quality": does the machine question its statements?
> You and I
Actually, the process is that of building on already vetted ideas, and continuously vetting. True, there is an economy of effort, but there is also a capitalization on past effort. // It is unfair to say that you "«parrot»", just because of early stopping, assuming you are trained to vet your output.
> new ... what artists have been doing ... previous ideas
You should revise your perspective there: we learn from the (bigger and smaller) "giants" in the past, and learning is very different from plain imitation. What is learnt is internally elaborated, understood, integrated. There is a whole world of difference from "I learnt from A" and "Z copied A".
> calculators don't reason
But calculators bring a reliable result, and that is what is expected from them. You expect the same from intelligent entities.
> What is your best example
Decision Support Systems. (Edit: I meant as a support Analyst; as an information retriever it could instead be a dramatic asset, if employed as a hound to retrieve sources.)