Folk Psychological Attributions of Consciousness to Large Language Models

Technological advances raise new puzzles and challenges for cognitive science and thestudy of how humans think about and interact with artificial intelligence (AI). For example, theadvent of Large Language Models and their human-like linguistic abilities has raised substantialdebate regarding whether or not AI could be conscious. Here we consider the question ofwhether AI could have subjective experiences such as feelings and sensations(“phenomenological consciousness”). While experts from many fields have weighed in on thisissue in academic and public discourse, it remains unknown how the general populationattributes phenomenology to AI. We surveyed a sample of US residents (N=300) and found thata majority of participants were willing to attribute phenomenological consciousness to LLMs.These attributions were robust, as they predicted attributions of mental states typically associatedwith phenomenology – but also flexible, as they were sensitive to individual differences such asusage frequency. Overall, these results show how folk intuitions about AI consciousness candiverge from expert intuitions – with important implications for the legal and ethical status of AI.