A man who understands zero Chinese can still fake a perfect Chinese conversation

In philosopher John Searle's 1980 thought experiment, a person who knows no Chinese sits in a room following an English rulebook that maps incoming Chinese symbols to outgoing ones, producing flawless replies without understanding a word. Searle argued a computer running a program, however convincing its output, might be doing exactly the same thing: manipulating symbols with no real understanding. It remains one of the most contested arguments against strong artificial intelligence.

— John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Programs — Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980