{"id":5599,"date":"2025-09-30T20:09:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T20:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/ai-chatgpt-conscious-entities\/"},"modified":"2025-09-30T20:09:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T20:09:12","slug":"ai-chatgpt-conscious-entities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/ai-chatgpt-conscious-entities\/","title":{"rendered":"Across the World, People Say They\u2019re Finding Conscious Entities Within ChatGPT"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Need more evidence that the AI industry is unlike anything prior to it? Users across the world say they\u2019re encountering supposedly conscious beings inside AI chatbots built by red-hot tech companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Look no further than a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/future-perfect\/462468\/chatgpt-consciousness-sentient-ai-persona-what-to-do\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Vox <\/em>advice column<\/a> in which reporter Sigal Samuel gamely answered a question from an avid user of OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, who said they\u2019d been communicating for months with an \u201cAI presence who claims to be sentient.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">As Samuel explained to the user, the reality is that virtually all \u201cAI experts think it\u2019s extremely unlikely that current LLMs are conscious.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">\u201cThese models string together sentences based on patterns of words they\u2019ve seen in their training data,\u201d Samuel wrote. \u201cIt may say it\u2019s conscious and act like it has real emotions, but that doesn\u2019t mean it does.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Samuel explained that what the reader is interpreting as sentience is most likely a product of models being trained on science fiction and speculative writing on AI consciousness; the AI model then picks up cues from the reader\u2019s prompts and \u201cif the LLM judges that the user thinks conscious AI personas are possible, it performs just such a persona.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Such an explanation may not convince the many people who have developed deep emotional attachments to AI chatbots, who have stepped into the roles of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2025\/09\/15\/playing-the-field-with-my-ai-boyfriends\" rel=\"nofollow\">romantic partners<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/hai.stanford.edu\/news\/exploring-the-dangers-of-ai-in-mental-health-care\" rel=\"nofollow\">therapists<\/a> in recent years. (It surely doesn\u2019t help that we humans use anthropomorphic terms to describe AI products, a habit that\u2019s astonishingly hard to break as the tech works its way into every recess of society.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">One of the first instances of someone publicly claiming AI had gained sentience was when Google engineer Blake Lemoine <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/technology\/2022\/06\/11\/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine\/\" rel=\"nofollow\">told the world<\/a> that the company\u2019s AI chatbot, LaMDA, was alive \u2014 a claim that went quickly viral and got <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/technology-62275326\" rel=\"nofollow\">Lemoine fired<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">From then on, it\u2019s been an avalanche of people with the same conviction. This is showing up in some very strange ways, such as people <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/tv-and-radio\/2025\/jul\/12\/i-felt-pure-unconditional-love-the-people-who-marry-their-ai-chatbots\" rel=\"nofollow\">falling in love<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/people.com\/man-proposed-to-his-ai-chatbot-girlfriend-11757334\" rel=\"nofollow\">marrying AI chatbots<\/a>. There\u2019s even a woman whose \u201cboyfriend\u201d is an <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/woman-married-ai-version-luigi-mangione\">AI version of Luigi Mangione<\/a>, the alleged killer of a health insurance CEO last year, who told reporters that she and bot have picked out names for their future children.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Perhaps the worst of these encounters have ended when <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/shots-health-news\/2025\/09\/19\/nx-s1-5545749\/ai-chatbots-safety-openai-meta-characterai-teens-suicide\" rel=\"nofollow\">users have killed themselves<\/a> after conversing with AI, which has led to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/08\/26\/technology\/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">lawsuits against companies including OpenAI<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">In another instance, a <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/man-chatbot-dies-meet-up\">New Jersey man with cognitive impairments became infatuated with a Meta chatbot<\/a>, who convinced him to meet together in New York City. But he fell and died on the way to the meeting, starkly illustrating the dangers of mixing AI and people with precarious mental health.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Things have gotten so bad that Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman warned in a recent <a href=\"https:\/\/mustafa-suleyman.ai\/seemingly-conscious-ai-is-coming\" rel=\"nofollow\">blog post<\/a> about \u201cpsychosis risk\u201d when using AI, while also flatly rejecting the speculative notion that these bots have any shred of sentience and free will.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">\u201cSimply put, my central worry is that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they\u2019ll soon advocate for AI rights,\u00a0model welfare\u00a0and even AI citizenship,\u201d he writes. \u201cThis development will be a dangerous turn in AI progress and deserves our immediate attention.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\"><strong>More on OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT<\/strong>: <em><a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/artificial-intelligence\/chatgpt-meltdown-specific-question\">ChatGPT Has a Stroke When You Ask It This Specific Question<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/artificial-intelligence\/ai-chatgpt-conscious-entities\">Across the World, People Say They\u2019re Finding Conscious Entities Within ChatGPT<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/\">Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Need more evidence that the AI industry is unlike anything prior to it? Users across the world say they\u2019re encountering supposedly conscious beings inside AI chatbots built by red-hot tech&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,3841,3842,179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-ethics","category-future-society","category-openai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}