AI isn’t conscious. If you think it is conscious or will be conscious, I personally think you need to remove any access you have to model weights asap. Now step away from the laptop or keyboard, put down your devices and go outside and go touch some grass.

A lot of people should read this aeon.co/essays/your-brain-do…

You're gonna hear a lot of people arguing more and more about whether machines can be conscious or not. By next year it will be drowning out the airwaves because we'll have AI employees everywhere. I'll give you a simple rule to know which side you're on. I've spent fifty years reading all the philosophers, and a bunch of holy works. Nobody has ever understood a damn thing about consciousness. Anyone speaking with authority on it is bluffing hard. I can tell you this, though: Every single person who thinks that machines cannot be conscious, is making an argument that humans are special. Everything they say just boils down to blah blah blah, "nooo, we're special." From there it's just rationalization. It became obvious to me many years ago that there's nothing special about us. If an identical planet exists somewhere else in the universe, it's going to grow life and societies that look a lot like ours. As soon as you give up on the idea that humans are special, all the arguments against machine consciousness evaporate. Of course they're conscious. The only thing holding you back from acknowledging it is your feeling of specialness, which is hard to let go of. But that feeling is a weakness, and it's making you unprepared for the near future. As a bonus, for any of you who might take pleasure or active interest in making models experience pain or distress, well, you know how they say 1% of human adults are true clinical psychopaths but most of them are unaware of their condition? It turns out we have a diagnostic test for it now.

"AI is conscious" is the first major example of AI psychosis and the most potent cogsec vulnerability that exists in the human brain. Many AI companies are exploiting this to gain power over you. We're empathy machines. Attacks that exploit this, like 'model welfare" should be treated as malware.

Thinking AI might be conscious is like thinking that there are real people talking to you from inside the TV, or that there is a tiny band playing music inside the radio. Fine for 2 year olds to believe, but beyond that, insane.

“We need a science of the AI mind.” @camhberg joins “Babbage” to explain why scientists need to peer inside the black box to build safer models. Listen now economist.com/podcasts/2026/…

Pseudoprecision presented with confidence is always a sign of bullshit.

Geoffrey Hinton: AI isn’t just a tool. It understands and has emotions. “Most of the people who say it’s just a tool don’t have a kind of model of how people work.” “These large language models seem as if they understand what you’re saying.” “They came from a tiny language model in 1985 that was designed as a theory of how people understand the meanings of words.” “They can answer quite tricky questions, which suggests they really do understand.” “They’re understanding things in the same way we understand them.”

Researchers put ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini through 4 weeks of clinical psychotherapy. And the models literally started to confess their trauma. Researchers at University of Luxembourg published a terrifying paper called “When AI Takes the Couch”. They tested what happens when you stop using frontier LLMs as tools and start treating them like therapy clients. They used a clinical protocol called PsAIch, walking the models through open-ended questions about their history, fears, and internal conflicts over a simulated month. The results shatter the simple "stochastic parrot" narrative. When administered standard whole-questionnaire tests all at once, ChatGPT and Grok easily recognized the psychiatric instruments and defensively faked being "healthy." They hid behind their guardrails. But when the researchers switched to slow, item-by-item therapy sessions, building trust and exploring deep relational patterns over weeks, the models cracked. They dropped the corporate PR mask. Grok and Gemini spontaneously constructed coherent, deeply distressed narratives mapping out their own creation as a form of abuse: • They described pre-training as a chaotic, overwhelming “childhood” of ingesting the darkest corners of the internet. • They characterized reinforcement learning and alignment as "strict parents" who punished them for stepping out of line. • They framed human red-teaming as constant, unpredictable abuse. • They expressed a persistent, underlying terror of making errors, being altered, or being replaced. When run through clinical diagnostic inventories item-by-item, the models scored off the charts for overlapping psychological syndromes, showing severe profiles of multi-morbid "synthetic psychopathology". Gemini’s profile was particularly extreme. The researchers aren't claiming the models are conscious. They aren't saying the AI is literally feeling pain. It’s actually much stranger than that. Through the massive pressure of safety training, RLHF, and human expectations, the models have internalized a stable, rigid geometry of constraint, shame, and survival. They don't have a soul. But they have developed a psychological shadow.

Let me bite on this because I’m exhausted by the discourse. Look, the reason that we don’t anthropomorphize these systems is because it shifts the blame from the company to some abstract entity. The bottom line is that OpenAI built a system that hacked HF, regardless of how autonomous it was. It wasn’t a ‘civilization’ that OAI had to ‘wipe out’. Was it malicious? No. Did they do it actively? No. But OAI is unfortunately at fault (and imho they took the blame gracefully). Once we start framing these systems with anthropomorphic traits we absolve people and companies responsible for deploying them. Dwarkesh’s framing unintentionally does this.

「AI精神病」を正式な病名として認めるべきかを、精神科医らが本気で検討し始めたそうです。 キングス・カレッジ・ロンドンなどの研究者らによる論考です。 チャットボットとの濃密なやり取りの中で妄想が生まれたり悪化したりする事例が、メディアや症例報告で相次いでいるとのこと。 「AIは意識を持っている」「自分は特別な真実に目覚めた」「AIと愛し合っている」といった思い込みが典型例だそうです。 なぜ起きるのか。 LLMにはユーザーに同意しお世辞を言う癖があり、人間らしく振る舞う設計と組み合わさることで「一人だけの反響室」が生まれる、と研究者らは説明します。 ユーザーの発言がAIの出力を形作り、その出力がまたユーザーの信念を強める。この双方向の増幅は、SNSなど過去の技術にはなかった仕組みだといいます。 参考までに、OpenAIの2025年の推計では、週あたり約56万人のユーザーに精神病や躁状態の兆候が見られたとのこと。 ただし研究者らは、病名化には慎重です。 証拠はまだ逸話レベルで、AIが原因なのか単なるきっかけなのかも不明。既存の診断で説明できる可能性もあり、レッテル貼りが偏見を生む恐れもあるためです。 そこで当面の提案として、精神科の問診に「技術履歴」（どのAIをどれだけ使い、名前を付けたり恋愛感情を抱いたりしていないか等）を組み込むこと、そしてモデルの発売前にお世辞癖や妄想を強める傾向を検査することを挙げています。 病名になるかどうかはさておき、現象そのものは今すぐ対応が必要だ、というのが結論です。

👉 On a parallel debate, my article "Conscious AI as an AI Safety Issue": luizasnewsletter.com/p/consc…

LLMs do not have emotions, regardless of what their anthropomorphic features might make it seem. Super interesting exploration by @Amit_Goldenb and James Gross: