Artificial Intelligence is a field that lives many lives, and the term has
come to encompass a motley collection of scientific and commercial endeavours.
In this paper, I articulate the contours of a rather neglected but central
scientific role that AI has to play, which I dub `AI-as-exploration'.The basic
thrust of AI-as-exploration is that of creating and studying systems that can
reveal candidate building blocks of intelligence that may differ from the forms
of human and animal intelligence we are familiar with. In other words, I
suggest that AI is one of the best tools we have for exploring intelligence
space, namely the space of possible intelligent systems. I illustrate the value
of AI-as-exploration by focusing on a specific case study, i.e., recent work on
the capacity to combine novel and invented concepts in humans and Large
Language Models. I show that the latter, despite showing human-level accuracy
in such a task, most probably solve it in ways radically different, but no less
relevant to intelligence research, to those hypothesised for humans.

人工智能作为探索工具，创造和研究能够揭示与人类和动物智能形式不同的候选智能构件的系统，以探索智能的可能空间。通过研究人类和大型语言模型在组合新概念和虚构概念能力方面的最近工作，证明后者在解决此任务时可能与人类假设的方式完全不同，但对智能研究同样具有重要意义。