[Serious] Is ChatGPT a Chinese Room?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Developer: OpenAI, OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

That's nothing to do with it. The Chinese Room Argument makes the case that if, for example, a computer programmed with Chinese characters responds to questions so well that any speaker of Chinese would assume that they were talking to a real person (passing the Turing test), that person would not be able to tell if the computer actually understands Chinese, or is merely simulating understanding Chinese. If you were locked in a room with a copy of the AI program, and questions written in Chinese were passed to you under the door, you could use the program to print our your responses in Chinese without understanding Chinese. Same with a computer.

Boru

...all of which raises the question "what is the difference between understanding a language and the ability to use its symbols?" IMHO the sematic content of words is difficult to pin down. Perhaps there is no semantic content. Is it maybe that is wholely reducable to syntax? As in the meaning of any given word is solely determined by the words around it...which leads to an infinite regress.