Thinking is better understood than you seem to believe.

We don't just study it in humans. We look at it in trees [0], for example. And whilst trees have distributed systems that ingest data from their surroundings, and use that to make choices, it isn't usually considered to be intelligence.

Organizational complexity is one of the requirements for intelligence, and an LLM does not reach that threshold. They have vast amounts of data, but organizationally, they are still simple - thus "ai slop".

[0] https://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science/abstract/S1360-138...