AI & SOCIETY
May 1, 2026
Tom McClelland
Artificial intelligence has produced notable original works in art, science, and gaming, raising the question of whether such machines can be considered creative. Human creativity often involves conscious experience of the creative process, which might suggest that unconscious AI systems are not truly creative. The author argues that consciousness is not generally necessary for creativity, but proposes a more specific claim: consciousness is required for creativity in projects with aesthetic goals. Without consciousness, an AI lacks aesthetic experience and therefore cannot engage in aesthetic creative projects.
AI & SOCIETY
May 1, 2026
Jan Henrik Wasserziehr
Even if artificial systems achieve consciousness through computational functionalism, they are unlikely to experience valenced states—feelings of pleasure or pain—because they lack a non-derivative goal like self-preservation that grounds value for living organisms. This creates a value grounding problem: without such a disposition, there is no basis for some states to be objectively better or worse for the system itself. The paper examines four possible routes to artificial valence—designer-independent goals, reinforcement learning, rational evaluation, and hallucinations—and concludes that none resolve this problem. Consequently, recent proposals for artificial consciousness probably do not yield sentience.
AI & SOCIETY
May 1, 2026
Hermann Borotschnig
Artificial agents increasingly display emotion-like behaviors, raising the question of whether such systems risk instantiating consciousness. This paper proposes a hierarchical, dual-source control architecture for synthetic emotion that deliberately excludes architectural features associated with access-like consciousness, as defined by major theories. The architecture combines motivational signals from immediate needs with affective guidance from episodic memory to modulate action selection. The authors specify four engineering risk-reduction constraints: no global broadcast, no metarepresentation, no autobiographical consolidation, and bounded learning. They demonstrate that an emotion-like controller can satisfy these constraints, identify safe extensions, and map gradual transitions that increase access risk. The work provides a methodological template for converting consciousness-related questions into auditable architectural tests and preliminary audit indicators for governance frameworks.
AI & SOCIETY
January 1, 2026
Pablo González Torre, Marta Pérez-verdugo, Xabier E. Barandiaran
Digital platforms exploit the attention economy by using AI and data analytics to shape user engagement, creating cycles of attention capture and data extraction. Classical cognitivist and behaviorist theories fail to address harms to user autonomy and wellbeing. 4E approaches to cognitive science—emphasizing embodied, extended, enactive, and ecological cognition—provide a normative standpoint for understanding how digital environments actively constitute attentional patterns. Habit formation in digital contexts threatens personal autonomy by disaggregating habits into AI-managed behavioral patterns. A paradigm shift toward an ecology of attention is needed to foster environments that preserve human cognitive and social capacities against cognitive capitalism's exploitative tendencies.