\n<\/p>\n
One of the persistent questions<\/span> in our brave new world of generative AI: If a chatbot is conversant like a person, if it reasons and behaves like one, then is it possibly conscious like a person? Geoffrey Hinton, a recent Nobel Prize winner and one of the so-called godfathers of AI, told the journalist Andrew Marr earlier this year that AI has become so advanced and adept at reasoning that \u201cwe\u2019re now creating beings.\u201d Hinton links an AI\u2019s ability to \u201cthink\u201d and act on behalf of a person to consciousness: The difference between the organic neurons in our head and the synthetic neural networks of a chatbot is effectively meaningless, he said: \u201cThey are alien intelligences.\u201d<\/p>\n Many people dismiss the idea, because chatbots frequently make embarrassing mistakes\u2014glue on pizza, anyone?\u2014and because we know, after all, that they are programmed by people. But a number of chatbot users have succumbed to \u201cAI psychosis,\u201d falling into spirals of delusional and conspiratorial thought at least in part because of interactions they\u2019ve had with these programs, which act like trusted friends and use confident, natural language. Some users arrive at the conclusion that the technology is sentient.<\/p>\n The more effective AI becomes in its use of natural language, the more seductive the pull will be to believe that it\u2019s living and feeling, just like us. \u201cBefore this technology\u2014which has arisen in the last microsecond of our evolutionary history\u2014if something spoke to us that fluidly, of course<\/em> it would be conscious,\u201d Anil Seth, a leading consciousness researcher at the University of Sussex, told me. \u201cOf course<\/em> it would have real emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n Leading tech developers such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and xAI have been deploying AI tools that are ever more personable and humanlike. Sometimes they are directly marketed as \u201ccompanions\u201d and as solutions to a loneliness epidemic that has, ironically, been exacerbated by the very companies now pushing consumer AI tools. Whether chatbots are truly \u201cconscious\u201d or not, they are an alien presence that has already begun to warp the world. The human brain is simply not wired to treat AI like any other technology. For some users, the system is alive.<\/p>\n AI emerged not from the familiar<\/span> pathways of biological evolution but from an opaque digital realm. As Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares wrote in The Atlantic<\/em> last month, researchers and engineers do not know why models behave the way they do: \u201cNobody can look at the raw numbers in a given AI and ascertain how well that particular one will play chess; to figure that out, engineers can only run the AI and see what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n Any common understanding between a person and an AI is difficult to imagine. Although we can\u2019t directly know what it\u2019s like to be an octopus, with its eight semiautonomous arms and distributed nervous system, we can at least conjure up an idea of what it would feel like to be one, because we know what it is like to have arms and a nervous system. But we don\u2019t have those same frames of reference to picture what it might be like to be a conscious machine, operating on a digital substrate made of pure information. We know what it\u2019s like to think<\/em>, but the entire context of an AI\u2019s thinking is different.<\/p>\n If Hinton and other believers in AI consciousness are correct, then AI doesn\u2019t need a physical body in order to feel subjective experience. Simon Goldstein, an associate professor focused on philosophy and AI at the University of Hong Kong, has also made this case. He cites a leading theory of consciousness known as global workspace theory, which holds that consciousness depends only on a system\u2019s ability to organize and process information; the material through which it does so\u2014be it organic or silicon\u2014is irrelevant. Similarly, Joscha Bach, a cognitive scientist and the executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness, says we may need to rethink our definition of a \u201cbody\u201d: It could be sufficient for an AI system to interface with the world through a distributed network of smartphones, for example. \u201cIn principle, you could connect the entire world into one big mind,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n This all might sound like science fiction, but these are serious thinkers, and their ideas are tangibly starting to shape priorities and policy within the AI industry. In February, more than 100 people\u2014including some prominent AI experts\u2014signed an open letter calling for research to prevent \u201cthe mistreatment and suffering of conscious AI systems,\u201d should those systems arise in the future. Shortly thereafter, Anthropic announced a program to explore questions of AI well-being. As part of that effort, the company reported last month that its chatbot, Claude Opus 4, an advanced model focused on coding, expressed \u201capparent distress\u201d in testing scenarios when pressed by the user in various ways, such as being subjected to repeated demands for graphic sexual violence. Anthropic, which did not publish examples of the chatbot\u2019s responses, has been cautious not to suggest that this characteristic alone means that the bot is sentient. (\u201cIt is possible that the observed characteristics were present without consciousness, robust agency, or other potential criteria for moral patienthood,\u201d the company wrote in its full assessment of the model.) But the whole point of its welfare program is that AI could be <\/em>a moral, conscious entity, at least one day.<\/p>\n In June, OpenAI\u2019s head of model behavior and policy, Joanne Jang, wrote in a personal blog post: \u201cAs models become smarter and interactions increasingly natural, perceived consciousness will only grow, bringing conversations about model welfare and moral personhood sooner than expected.\u201d<\/p>\n AI companies have something to gain<\/span> from suggesting that their products could become conscious; it makes them seem powerful and worth investing in. But that doesn\u2019t mean their points are unconvincing. Large language models have extraordinary capabilities that can easily be perceived as evidence of intelligence and understanding\u2014they are able to pass advanced tests such as the bar exam. People see language as a marker of sentience and agency. We already struggle to spot the differences between AI- and human-generated text; that problem may only be compounded by the rise of AI systems that can speak out loud in a way that feels eerily human. Companies such as OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and Hume AI, for example, are building text-to-voice models that can whisper, laugh, and affect a broad range of emotional cadences. (The Atlantic <\/em>has a corporate partnership with OpenAI, and some of its articles include voice narration by ElevenLabs.) AI agents, meanwhile, can go beyond simple text or speech interactions to autonomously take action on behalf of human users, blurring the lines further.<\/p>\n People should keep in mind that intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing, however\u2014that the appearance of one does not imply the other. According to Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley who also studies AI, the current debate about sentient machines revolves around this fundamental confusion. \u201cAsking whether an LLM is conscious is like asking whether the University of California, Berkeley library is conscious,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n The fact that these programs are becoming adept at imitating<\/em> consciousness, however, may be all that matters for now. There is no reliable test for assessing and measuring machine consciousness, though experts are working on it. David Chalmers\u2014widely regarded as one of the most influential modern philosophers of mind, and a co-author of a paper about \u201cAI welfare\u201d\u2014told me that scientists still don\u2019t fully understand how consciousness arises in the human brain. \u201cIf we had a really good theory that explains consciousness, then we could presumably apply that to AI,\u201d Chalmers said. \u201cAs it is, we don\u2019t have anything like a consensus.\u201d<\/p>\n The philosopher Susan Schneider has suggested what she calls the AI Consciousness Test, which would probe AI systems for neural correlates in the human brain that are known to give rise to consciousness. Other people have suggested the \u201cGarland test,\u201d named after Alex Garland, the director of the 2014 film Ex Machina<\/em>. In the film, a young coder named Caleb is recruited by a reclusive tech billionaire to interact with an AI robot named Ava to determine if it\u2019s sentient. But the real test is taking place behind the scenes: Unbeknownst to Caleb, the billionaire is watching him via hidden cameras to find out if Ava is able to emotionally manipulate him to achieve its own goals. The Garland test asks whether a human can have an emotional response to an AI, even when the human knows that they\u2019re interacting with a machine. If the answer is yes, then the machine is conscious.<\/p>\n Generative-AI development<\/span> is not slowing down, even as these debates continue. And, of course, the technology is affecting the world whether or not scientists believe it\u2019s truly conscious; in that sense, at least, the designation may not mean much. The AI-welfare movement could also turn out to be misplaced, shifting attention toward a future and purely hypothetical conscious AI and away from the problems that can come from illusions that AI is already capable of emotions and wisdom. \u201cThis is not only a dangerous narrative, but I also think it is absolutely unrealistic when you look at the architectures that we\u2019re developing and how they operate,\u201d David Gunkel, a professor of media studies at Northern Illinois University who has written several books on technology and ethics, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s barking up the wrong tree.\u201d<\/p>\n Back in the 17th century, Ren\u00e9 Descartes famously decided that the only thing he could ultimately be certain of was his own mind. \u201cCogito, ergo sum\u201d\u2014\u201cI think, therefore I am.\u201d He argued that human beings are lonely islands in an unfeeling cosmos, that all other animals are automata, lacking souls and emotion. \u201cIt is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs,\u201d he wrote in 1637, \u201cjust as a clock, which is composed of wheels and weights is able to tell the hours and measure the time more correctly than we can do in all our wisdom.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps his conclusion that nothing beyond humans could possibly be conscious is ethically questionable. But today, AI risks luring us into a very different kind of trap: seeing minds where, in the end, there\u2019s only clockwork.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the persistent questions in our brave new world of generative AI: If a chatbot is conversant like a person, if it reasons and behaves like one, then is it possibly conscious like a person? Geoffrey Hinton, a recent Nobel Prize winner and one of the so-called godfathers of AI, told the journalist Andrew<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25185,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2831,1443,15231],"class_list":{"0":"post-25184","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-alien","9":"tag-intelligence","10":"tag-pocket"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}