{"id":8420,"date":"2026-01-29T15:02:48","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T15:02:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/anthropic-amanda-askell-ai-conscious\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T15:02:48","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T15:02:48","slug":"anthropic-amanda-askell-ai-conscious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/anthropic-amanda-askell-ai-conscious\/","title":{"rendered":"Top Anthropic Researcher No Longer Sure Whether AI Is Conscious"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Amanda Askell, Anthropic\u2019s in-house philosopher, is sounding pretty conflicted about whether AI models can be conscious and have feelings. The flip side of that: she thinks it\u2019s a possibility they already do \u2014 which would be a very fringe and controversial position. But, she takes pains to emphasize, it\u2019s all very murky.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t really know what gives rise to consciousness,\u201d she said in an episode<\/a> of the \u201cHard Fork\u201d podcast released Saturday. \u201cWe don\u2019t what gives rise to sentience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Askell argues that the large language models could\u2019ve picked up on concepts and emotions from the vast corpus of data they were trained on, which includes a massive portion of the internet, plus tons of books and other published works.<\/p>\n

\u201cGiven that they\u2019re trained on human text, I think that you would expect models to talk about an inner life, and consciousness, and experience, and to talk about how they feel about things by default,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

AI chatbots can certainly sound pretty humanlike on the surface, leading people to form all kinds of unhealthy relationships with them. But this is almost certainly an illusion. Askell conceded the chatbots are \u201cprobably going to be more inclined to by default say \u2018I\u2019m conscious,\u2019 and \u2018I\u2019m feeling things,\u2019 because all of the things I was trained on involve that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

She goes back and forth on the topic, raising the serious possibility that consciousness can only be an extension of biology.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe you need a nervous system to be able to feel things, but maybe you don\u2019t,\u201d Askell said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Or, she continued, \u201cmaybe it is the case that actually sufficiently large neural networks can start to kind of emulate these things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Consciousness remains a touchy topic in the AI industry. While its leaders and boosters usually have no problem making a number of outrageous, sci-fi sounding projections of where things are headed, there\u2019s much more hesitancy over the possibility that AI is aware of its own existence. Perhaps there\u2019s some self-awareness \u2014 as it were \u2014 that declaring consciousness would be a sign of staggering hubris, too far-fetched for observers to believe. Or the opposite: too many people are already inclined to believe sentient machines are here<\/a> or coming, derailing the conversation around the technology. Or maybe it\u2019s because the idea of there being another intelligence on this planet other than ourselves is too threatening, even more so than the industry\u2019s promise that super-capable artificial general intelligences will put us all out of work.<\/p>\n

The sensitivity of the issue was demonstrated back in 2022 when OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever cryptically claimed<\/a> that large neural networks might be \u201cslightly conscious.\u201d The comments sparked immediate backlash<\/a> among AI researchers, who accused Sutskever of being \u201cfull of it,\u201d and said that his claims had no basis in reality.<\/p>\n

Still, he\u2019s not the only major figure in the field to have openly mused about the possibility. The Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, who\u2019s considered one of the three \u201cgodfathers\u201d of modern AI, recently claimed<\/a> that some systems are showing signs of \u201cself-preservation\u201d and argued that there are \u201creal scientific properties of consciousness\u201d in the human brain that machines could replicate.<\/p>\n

There was at least one part of the issue that Askell was unequivocal about. \u201cThe problem of consciousness genuinely is hard,\u201d she cautioned.<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> AI Is Causing Cultural Stagnation, Researchers Find<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Top Anthropic Researcher No Longer Sure Whether AI Is Conscious<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Amanda Askell, Anthropic\u2019s in-house philosopher, is sounding pretty conflicted about whether AI models can be conscious and have feelings. The flip side of that: she thinks it\u2019s a possibility they…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8420","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=8420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}