Why We Keep Tricking Ourselves Into Thinking A.I. Is Conscious

Dr. Weatherby is the director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University.

A funny thing keeps happening on the internet. A prominent thinker chats with a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude for a while, and then decides that it might be conscious. They report this to the public, and a round of intense argument and speculation about artificial intelligence “minds” ensues. These little kerfuffles pass quickly. But they are persistent, and I’ve been thinking about why.

The common denominator seems to be that these new believers in a possible A.I. consciousness are often deeply educated in the very disciplines that make these A.I. models work, such as computer science or math or statistics. The list includes the former Google engineer Blake........

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