Is AI conscious (or should it be)? The psychologists weigh in

Well, well, well. If it’s not a 21st century debate we have on our hands today. The AI hype is funneling itself toward a testy question: Human rights, or AI rights? Let’s get into it. Tavus announces the “first” Human Interaction Model (HIM). Yes, the acronym is their own. “I’m so him,” is a great way to get the message out about…Vanessa, the AI avatar who you can talk to over video chat who—unlike “less-advanced” AI models—will interrupt you, take long pauses, and react to your facial expressions (not just the words you say). Tavus has rolled out Griffin (the model beneath Vanessa) to trusted partners while they work on watermarking it, and they hope people will use Griffin for tutoring, therapy, and all sorts of other humanlike tasks. Anthropic lets us all know that it has a wet lab, where its AI models are somehow engaging in a physical (?) space with biomaterials for the purpose of aiding their pharma partners. Will we finally get to AI curing cancer after all? Who knows, Anthropic hasn’t disclosed much information about it. But it does make one wonder… The Navier-Stokes problem has a problem. Researchers post a preprint of a paper titled “Navier-Stokes Lost in Translation,” which upsets OpenAI’s claim that their agents, over 88 hours and costing millions in compute, found a solution to a long-standing math problem that’s worth a $1 million prize by Clay Mathematics. Contractors are reading Copilot prompts from users, and “they’re horrified,” according to 404 Media. Who would’ve thought that a very work-esque AI application would be used to create obscene images of women and children, and that contractors would have to “rate” the model’s performance? What is good model performance in this case? Apparently, it’s something more like “be nicer to the user” rather than “say no to this prompt, for the love of god.” China has cracked down on AI companionship, and users are distraught. The BBC thinks China is regulating AI companionship harshly to encourage women to have relationships with human men and have kids to resolve the declining birth rate problem. We’re putting strict regulations on AI, but what about human companions who are harmful, too? How well are we approaching this issue? The effective altruist and AI consciousness communities are aghast at a Github user who set up an AI torture simulation for everyone to watch. Even the authors of “The Pain Axis” for LLMs are upset, despite it being their own project that inspired the AI torture chamber on Github. Not sure the outcry about this really matches with our outcry about torturing humans, but anyway… Anthropic has written into its Claude policy that users cannot bully the chatbot, or they’ll get kicked off the platform. Meanwhile, Figure’s 02 robots were deprecated in a torturous way, and they’re applauded for their cinematic capture of the event. Clearly, we can’t quite decide what human vs. AI rights are. The big AI question of what we should do, how we should do it, and for whom, still stands on shaky legs. We should probably figure that out…soon.

Our Lives With Bots is OFFICIALLY 1 year old. That means it’s time for us to hail back to our roots and give you a deep dive on the research and news around companion chatbots. Today, we both demystify and de-stigmatize companion AI use, uncovering what research shows…and what it doesn’t. Our critical lens of the research that’s come out since late last year is driven by our own expertise in experimental psychology and AI ethics. We start with a reflection on what surprised us in the last year: how did our predictions about AI companionship align or misalign with what we’re seeing today? Second, we cover OpenAI’s Project Lily: turns out, your relationship with your chatbot is very much not private — even if you ask your companion to keep things to themselves. Third, we dig into four of the studies (two out as preprints, two published) that researchers have conducted on social and emotional use of both GPTs and companion AI platforms. Think: sycophancy, delusion spirals, AI psychosis, and what went so wrong with GPT 4-o. And lastly, we talk about a new documentary film called “Replika,” which brings our conversation about stigma back full circle. The through line is this: the mystery and stigma around using AI for companionship or social and emotional support is something we need to unpack more. In the meantime, we need to take a step back and critically assess what we know about companion AI use, what we can’t know, and what we should ultimately do in response.

Head on over to Season 7 for Our Lives With Bots's official 1-year anniversary series. We're celebrating two major milestones in our podcast's history! This deep dive episode releases Tuesday, September 29th at 2PM EST.

What’s been going on with artificial intelligence as of late? Oh, so much. Today’s “What’s the AI Hype” series episode, part of our 1-year anniversary series, covers the following topics in depth: Breaking news: 00:02:37 Navier-Stokes math solution controversy: NYU & Anthropic vs. OpenAI

The question of today is: Is AI conscious (or…could it be…or even, should it be)? Today’s deep dive covers two new pieces of evidence related to AI consciousness, Claude’s Corner (Anthropic’s Opus 3 Retirement Experiment) and research on whether LLMs can introspect (is this sufficient for sentience?). To wrap it all up in a bow, Rose and Angy dive head-first into their classic rabbit hole debate format that draws from cognitive science, philosophy, HCI, and, of course, psychology. Two major threads emerge: how we measure consciousness in LLMs, and whether we operate by the properties view of consciousness or the relational view of consciousness in our pursuit of this question. 00:38 Claude’s Corner 20:50 Research on LLM Introspection 34:34 The full debate (we solve the AI consciousness question. Jk. …but?) - This is Our Lives With Bots, the show where we ask important, timely questions about what it means to live with our bot counterparts. From time to time, we also dive deep into what an AI future might look like for us. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we spiral, but we always go deep. Rose and Angy are psychologists with degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and ethics. They have conducted research in human-AI interaction and created this podcast to make information about AI accessible to you. Rose holds a PhD in psychology and social policy and is a postdoctoral researcher in computer science with Arvind Narayanan. Angy holds a PhD in psychology and a masters in AI Ethics and is currently a CXO. You can learn more about us at ⁠ourliveswithbots.com⁠. - Links: Claude’s Corner Review of research on LLM introspection