AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

As the understanding literature continues to evolve, the notion of group understanding has become increasingly important. With the rise of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI), we may say that AI systems can contribute to group knowledge, but it is an open question as to whether or not they can contribute to group understanding. In what follows, I argue that CAI agents can be contributing members of group understanding in inflationary cases. In the next section, I lay out Kenneth Boyd’s (2019) account of deflationary and inflationary group understanding. In section three, I consider what it means to call a CAI an agent. In section four, I look at CAI agents in deflationary group understanding cases and conclude that the obstacles are too much to overcome. In section five, I look at AI agents in inflationary group understanding cases and argue that we can decouple trust relations from group grasping. In section six, I consider objections to my view.