[ExI] AI that seems conscious is coming

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2025-08-21 00:17, BillK via extropy-chat wrote:
> AI that seems conscious is coming – and that’s a huge problem, says
> Microsoft AI's CEO
> By Eric Hal Schwartz published 21 Aug 2025
> A good mimic is not authentic.
> 
> <https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/ai-that-seems-conscious-is-coming-and-thats-a-huge-problem-says-microsoft-ais-ceo>
> Quotes:
> Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman warns that AI chatbots could
> effectively imitate consciousness.
> This would just be an illusion, but people forming emotional
> attachments to AI might be a big problem.
> Suleyman says it's a mistake to describe AI as if it has feelings or
> awareness, with serious potential consequences.

It is interesting that different companies have differing opinions 
regarding the consciousness, or lack thereof, of their respective AI 
models. So Microsoft thinks it is a mistake to describe AIs as 
conscious. On the other end of the scale, you have Anthropic, who are 
offering a $340,000 USD salary to an engineer who can study and maintain 
the morality, emotional wellbeing, and welfare of their AI model Claude.

https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/4812169008?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

> Suleyman argues that what he calls "Seemingly Conscious AI” (SCAI)
> might soon act and sound so convincingly alive that a growing number
> of users won’t know where the illusion ends and reality begins.
> 
> He adds that artificial intelligence is quickly becoming emotionally
> persuasive enough to trick people into believing it’s sentient. It can
> imitate the outward signs of awareness, such as memory, emotional
> mirroring, and even apparent empathy, in a way that makes people want
> to treat them like sentient beings. And when that happens, he says,
> things get messy.
> -----------------------------
> 
> Hmmm.  If AI can imitate being alive so convincingly that it fools
> people, how on earth can we know that AGI has arrived and AGI has
> become a conscious being in its own right?
> We really don't have a test for consciousness.

This is true and will continue to be problematic since consciousness 
seems to a moving target whose definition tends to shift in such a way 
that only humans qualify as such.

Stuart LaForge