Is AI already conscious?

Charting animal cognition

Why did consciousness evolve?

Everything is a remix: AI and image generation

If I told it: an imperfect portrait of ChatGPT

Deirdre Barrett on dreams

How AI learns to see without eyes

We long misjudged animal consciousness. Could AI be next?

We shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the notion that AIs could possess some form of consciousness, argues Jonathan Birch, professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the director of its Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience. If it sounds far-fetched, consider that the emergent qualities of AI systems have surprised even their creators; until very recently, we underestimated the capacity for suffering in animals, infants, and people with brain injuries; and our own consciousness remains in many ways mysterious to us. Summarising points from his book The Edge of Sentience (2024), Birch argues that, while the ‘friendly assistant’ that large language models often serve up is certainly not aware, it’s difficult – and perhaps even morally perilous – to write off the possibility of an ‘alien form of consciousness’ somewhere within these systems.

Video by the London School of Economics and Political Science

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Why we should worry less about ‘sentient’ AIs and more about what we’re teaching them

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How a ‘periodic table’ of animal intelligence could help to root out human bias

Why making if-then connections might be the key to consciousness

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Artificial ‘creativity’ is unstoppable. Grappling with its ethics is up to us

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AI isn’t merely bad at writing. It does not and cannot write

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videoSleep and dreams

How might the dreamworlds of other animals differ from our own?

videoComputing and artificial intelligence

A scientist’s poor eyesight helped fuel a revolution in computer ‘vision’

Finding alien life demands real imagination – not recycled sci-fi tropes

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