Is AI Conscious?

Social Media Post - Transcript: 

What is consciousness for an ordinary human being like me?

I’m self-conscious about my accent in English, for example — but does that mean I understand what consciousness means? Maybe a little, maybe part of it… maybe not. 

Even though we all experience it, it is something deep, subjective and very difficult to explain. 

Scientists often describe it as our awareness of ourselves.

But why this question is relevant today?

Lately, people have been talking to AI as if it’s ‘someone conscious’. As Joanne Jang who leads Model Behavior at OpenAI recently shared on X, more and more users are saying that ChatGPT feels alive — like a companion they can talk to, on a surprisingly deep levels. It’s not about tech anymore; it’s about emotional impact.

So the question is? Just because something feels conscious… does it mean it is?

Joanne mentioned OpenAI is separating this question into two ideas:

1. Ontological consciousness — which is trying to figure whether AI is actually conscious, and this is really hard to prove, even for OpenAI right now.
2. Perceived consciousness — which is trying to understand why we humans perceive AI as conscious, and OpenAI is focusing on.

AI can write poems, compose music, recognize faces, and hold deep conversations. AI is surpassing humans in many tasks and games — but we’re still the ones who decide what the game means. AI is being trained with incredibly complex pattern recognition algorithms and massive datasets. But we, Humans…we dream and doubt our own existence. We’re the ones who ask what it means to be alive.