[Houshalter]

There is no question that additional data would be potentially useful to an AI. But it's a common fallacy that it's the only way to get "meaning". Data from a digital camera isn't fundamentally different than data from text. The only benefit is that visual data is far less compressed, more redundant. It's easier to find patterns in it. Natural language is a highly compressed description of things in the real world.

That said, it doesn't at all mean you can't learn anything meaningful from it. For example, you build a machine learning system to predict the missing words in a sentence. "A horse is similar to other farm animals like ____." Machines are getting better at this kind of thing, though still far from human level. Google's word2vec for example can take a word like "horse" and list the words that it is most similar to. You can subtract the representation for "man" from "king", add "woman" and it outputs "queen".