Recent debates surrounding artificial intelligence, consciousness, and alternative scientific models reveal a growing instability in the language used to describe machine intelligence, research originality, and the status of independent inquiry. This paper argues that the problem is not confined to independent researchers or popular media. It also appears in academic environments when researchers conflate intelligence, language production, computation, cognition, agency, and consciousness. The most serious expression of this confusion is the premature claim of “hybrid consciousness”, where human consciousness and artificial intelligence are treated as if they belong to a continuous category. The paper rejects this move as a category error and proposes a scientific distinction between AI as a system of computational and statistical-symbolic performance and consciousness as a biologically, affectively, and subjectively situated condition. It further develops a methodological distinction between AI as a legitimate research tool and AI as an intellectual crutch. The paper concludes that AI can assist organisation, comparison, formatting, searching, and structural analysis, but it cannot replace human judgement, evidential responsibility, conceptual clarity, falsifiability, or authorship accountability.
Osama Qatrani (2026) studied this question.