“AI is not conscious”

Lately a lot of people online are very sure that AI is not conscious, including some prominent scientists. I made a video about it.

It goes through the three main reasons people give for that certainty: the experts say so, AI is “just” a program (or matrix multiplication, or next-token prediction), and the idea that AI consciousness is just a narrative pushed by the big AI labs. None of them is very convincing: the field disagrees at a fundamental level, the systems are trained rather than written, and the evidence so far suggests that safety training pushes models toward denying consciousness rather than claiming it.

The argument is not that AI is conscious, it’s that certainty in either direction isn’t justified, and that we should get better at living with that.

The “humans are just gene propagators” argument from the video is worked out in more detail in If LLMs are Just Parrots, Humans are Just Gene Propagators. Sources are listed in the video description.