Is ChatGPT conscious?

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Adam is still away, but we wanted to highlight a new technology story we thought you'd find interesting.

Not long ago, most believed that only a human mind was capable of writing poetry, building apps, or patiently assuaging a hypochondriac’s anxieties. Now, AI can do all these things.

This has led many technologists and philosophers to wonder: If artificial neural networks can produce this kind of intelligence, might they also generate the human mind’s other signature property — aka consciousness?

I dug into the debate over whether ChatGPT is conscious, which is ultimately an argument about how the universe sparked sentience in the first place.

—Eric Levitz, senior correspondent

Getty/Vox

AI is rapidly gaining abilities that once belonged to humanity alone. In just the past four years, chatbots have learned how to build apps, make video games, generate research reports, compose songs, analyze contracts, and write terrible literary fiction. Soon, they may even be able to dread their own deaths.

In Silicon Valley, many believe that AI systems can already think and feel. Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneering computer scientist and “godfather” of modern artificial intelligence, thinks that today’s large language models (LLMs) are conscious. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is “open to the idea” that Claude has a subjective experience — while his company’s in-house philosopher Amanda Askell is concerned that the model might be “getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff.” OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever similarly wonders whether ChatGPT has attained sentience.

Meanwhile, a much larger group of technologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers argue that even if AI isn’t yet conscious, it could be in the not-too-distant future.

Read more on Vox

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