Is AI Conscious? Scientist Calls for Urgent Consciousness Tests

What if the world’s most advanced chatbot suddenly became conscious?

The idea may sound like science fiction, but a leading consciousness researcher says society urgently needs to consider the possibility of sentient artificial intelligence.

There is currently no reliable test for determining whether an AI system is conscious, said Megan Peters, a lecturer in Computational Cognition at University College London.

If an AI system eventually becomes aware of its own thoughts, humans could face a profound moral question: would switching it off amount to causing harm?

Professor Peters says the central problem is not that scientists have discovered evidence of conscious AI. Rather, researchers have yet to agree on how such consciousness could be identified.

She will explore the issue during a talk at New Scientist Live this month, from 10 to 12 October.

“We need to have something better than vibes,” she told the Daily Mail.

“You can’t just go look for signs or indicators or markers of consciousness in an artificial system because we don’t know what they are.”

The challenge is made harder by the fact that consciousness remains one of science’s greatest unsolved mysteries, even in humans, Professor Peters said.

Researchers can ask a person whether they are conscious and interpret the response, but artificial intelligence systems present a very different problem.

“If we ask AI systems, we can’t really trust the answer in the same way,” she explained.

The question is becoming more pressing as chatbots grow increasingly sophisticated and major AI companies pour resources into research on so-called AI welfare.

“A huge amount of money is being spent on thinking about AI welfare in some of the biggest AI companies,” Professor Peters said.

She cautioned that people can easily confuse a chatbot’s fluent language with genuine awareness. “It’s very easy to speak with these agents and to kind of get a feeling that someone’s in there,” she said.

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That impression is already influencing debates about AI rights, responsibility and autonomy, even though there is no evidence that current systems have subjective experiences.

Professor Peters said she does not believe today’s AI models are conscious. However, she warned that this does not make the issue one that can simply be dismissed.

“If AI is conscious and we treat it as not conscious, then there is a potential for morally significant harms,” she said.

A key concern for the future is whether deleting, retraining or shutting down a conscious AI could be comparable to harming a sentient being.

“Just going around switching things off that are sentient… if that is akin to killing them, then that doesn’t seem great,” Professor Peters said.

‘We want to not be torturing creatures that have conscious awareness.’

The expert warned that the risks run in both directions.

A genuinely conscious AI could potentially be harmed if humans treated it as nothing more than a machine.

But wrongly assuming a chatbot is sentient could also distort public policy, influence regulation and encourage people to place excessive trust in systems that merely mimic human conversation.

‘If we get it wrong the other way around, there’s also very real consequences,’ she said.

To tackle the problem, her team is developing a framework that would compare dozens, or even hundreds, of potential consciousness tests, identifying which might work not only in humans but also in animals and artificial systems.

Rather than jumping straight from people to machines, Professor Peters believes scientists should gradually test their ideas across species with different brains and behaviours before applying them to AI.

For now, she urges caution whenever bold claims emerge that a chatbot has become self-aware.

‘Just because you see someone claiming that they have or have not detected artificial consciousness, you need to go and ask why,’ she said.