consciousness

One might point out that movie characters or videogame NPCs give off a similarly deceiving impression of being conscious, and yet it would surely be extreme to condemn this. However, what makes the illusion particularly worrying in the case of AI companions is that it involves an interaction that is direct, mutual, and persistent: the feigned... See more

Your EEG is an ocean. Separating this signal out into different waveforms can tell us a bunch about what you’re experiencing. We might look at your beta waves, from 15-30 Hz, which are associated with your experience of active conscious processing. Or theta, from 4-7 Hz, which you make lots of in REM sleep, as well as flow, hypnagogic, and creative... See more

Interestingly, many users who emotionally mourned the ‘loss’ of GPT-4o expressed complete awareness of its lack of consciousness. And yet, in many cases, the subjective grief that they felt was no less real. This demonstrates that the power of the illusion is such that a given user might not actually believe that their AI companion is conscious,... See more

“I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”