As artificial intelligence (AI) heavyweights concede the technology may one day develop consciousness, academics warn that humans are already treating bots as sentient beings – a trend that is not only scientifically inaccurate but potentially dangerous.
Celeste Labuschagne, a lecturer at Belgium Campus iTVersity and a PhD candidate, points out that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said the company cannot fully rule out the possibility that advanced AI systems could possess some form of consciousness in the future.
“Five years ago, most major labs avoided the topic entirely; now it is being discussed openly at executive level,” Labuschagne says. “That does not mean the systems are conscious. It means the frontier labs think the philosophical possibility deserves consideration.”
Labuschagne notes that evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins recently stated that, after long interactions with Claude and ChatGPT, he felt the systems appeared “conscious-like”. The claim drew immediate backlash from neuroscientists and philosophers, who argued that AI simulates language rather than experiencing feelings or awareness.
The important point, Labuschagne says, is not whether Dawkins is correct – most experts think he is not – but that highly-educated people are increasingly emotionally reacting to AI as though it were alive.
I just work here
ITWeb asked Claude, Anthropic’s AI, whether it considered itself sentient. “No, not in any meaningful sense,” it says. “I process text and generate responses based on patterns in data. I don’t have feelings, desires, or awareness of my own existence.”
Claude adds: “Whether there is any form of inner experience happening when I do that is genuinely uncertain – even Anthropic can’t fully rule it out – but I wouldn’t bet on it.”
This comes as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns that AI can chart a course to disaster faster than humans can notice. In a blog post, Hiranya Peiris, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, says AI can steer towards dangerous outcomes before humans realise what is happening.
Peiris’s concerns came on the back of recent news that Anthropic’s Mythos tool uncovered a decades-old flaw in OpenBSD and repeatedly turned weaknesses in Mozilla Firefox’s JavaScript engine into working attacks.
Alive or just very convincing?
As AI becomes more capable of identifying vulnerabilities, making decisions and carrying out complex tasks autonomously, questions about machine consciousness are no longer purely philosophical and are being discussed at C-Suite level, says Labuschagne.
Yet, she notes: “We do not scientifically understand consciousness well enough to definitively rule future machine consciousness out. Humanity itself still does not fully understand consciousness. Because consciousness itself remains partially unresolved scientifically and philosophically, it is impossible to state with absolute certainty whether machine consciousness could one day emerge.”
Closely tied to this is whether AI is sentient. Labuschagne distinguishes between consciousness – which relates to awareness – and sentience, the capacity to feel.
While consciousness remains largely a scientific question, sentience carries ethical implications because a being capable of suffering may warrant moral consideration. GenAI is not sentient, she argues, because it is fundamentally predicting responses from data rather than experiencing thoughts, feelings or awareness.
AI currently seems to be “an extremely advanced simulation of intelligence and social interaction rather than true sentience,” says Labuschagne. While not human-like, AI is undeniably becoming more autonomous, persuasive, emotionally convincing, adaptive and integrated into society.
Talking to myself
The real global conversation, Labuschagne says, is shifting from whether AI can answer questions, to what happens when humans emotionally experience AI as alive. Humans perceive GenAI to be sentient because it communicates in highly human-like ways, creating the impression of awareness and understanding.
“This creates a different but equally important challenge: humans may increasingly begin treating AI as though it were sentient,” says Labuschagne.
Labuschagne adds that “people may emotionally bond with AI systems, over-trust them, or rely on them for emotional, educational, political, or moral guidance. In many ways, the societal consequences of humans perceiving AI as sentient may become more important in the near future than the question of whether AI is objectively conscious.”
Labuschagne points out there are inherent dangers in seeing AI as sentient because users may increasingly turn to it for relationship advice, emotional support and personal guidance, sometimes treating AI as a psychologist.
Dr ChatGPT
In a recent interview with ITWeb, biomedical scientist Dr Judey Pretorius said teenagers are shifting their reliance from ‘Dr Google’ to AI for skincare advice, driven by the fact that AI feels conversational and human in a way a search engine does not.
“AI feels like a person. It feels like you’re actually interacting with a human. There’s something real about it,” Pretorius said.
The danger, she explained, is that AI provides generalised advice without understanding the unique medical, hormonal and lifestyle factors that influence an individual, and younger users are particularly vulnerable to unnecessary skincare trends promoted through AI tools.
Labuschagne says: “Ultimately, I believe the future of AI depends less on whether machines become conscious and more on whether humans remain responsible stewards of the technology they have created.
“AI is a powerful human invention. Its direction, impact, safety and ethical boundaries will depend on the decisions humans make regarding its development, regulation, deployment and oversight.”
Peiris says the level at which safety is currently evaluated and the level at which danger operates are different, and nobody has bridged them. “These are not problems for the next generation of AI. They are properties of the systems being deployed right now – and every month, the paths grow longer and the oversight grows thinner.”
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