Folk psychological attributions of consciousness to large language models.
Neuroscience of consciousness January 1, 2024 Clara Colombatto, Stephen M Fleming 71 citations
A majority of a sample of 300 US residents were willing to attribute some possibility of phenomenal consciousness—subjective experiences like feelings and sensations—to large language models. These attributions were robust, predicting attributions of mental states typically linked to phenomenality, but also flexible, as they varied with individual differences such as how often participants used the technology. The findings suggest that folk intuitions about AI consciousness can diverge from expert views, with potential implications for the legal and ethical treatment of AI.