Most people believe AIs like ChatGPT have some kind of 'consciousness' and 'feelings'

We shouldn't really be shocked by the outcomes of surveys at this point, but we were rather taken aback by the apparent level of misconception out there regarding AIs like ChatGPT - with many folks seemingly believing that these chatbots have "some degree of consciousness."

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These days, AI is clearly doing a better job of fooling people into thinking it's somehow conscious (Image Credit: Pixabay)

According to a study from the University of Waterloo (flagged by TechSpot), two-thirds of respondents in a survey (of 300) in the US felt this was the case, and further they agreed that such AI tools can have "subjective experiences such as feelings and memories."

Of course, these are Large Language Models (LLMs) and they most certainly don't experience feelings - not by any definition or philosophy we're aware of - but they are cleverly constructed AIs that can appear this way, sure. Plus the datasets they're trained on are inevitably human content - the opinions and thoughts that they hoover up by the ton, from every corner of the web - so that's reflected in the replies to queries, clearly.

Clara Colombatto, professor of psychology at Waterloo, observes that:

"While most experts deny that current AI could be conscious, our research shows that for most of the general public, AI consciousness is already a reality."

While we're not an expert by any means, we'll happily throw our hat into the denial ring, as it were. What's really happening here is 'consciousness attributions' as the study puts it, which is obviously very, very different to any kind of actual consciousness.

The research underlines a key finding, though, in that the more people used ChatGPT, the more likely they were to see it as somehow 'conscious' - really meaning that they are developing some kind of empathy with the AI, which is understandable after regular usage.

Colombatto notes:

"These results demonstrate the power of language because a conversation alone can lead us to think that an agent that looks and works very differently from us can have a mind."

And to be fair, chatbots like ChatGPT do have a mind of sorts - well, millions upon millions of minds, and their collective outpourings on various forums across a swathe of the web, from Facebook to Reddit to X and beyond, no doubt.

What legal minds of the future will make of this seemingly indiscriminate grabbing of said opinions and discussions, or other online content besides - well, that's entirely another story, and one that could get pretty messy eventually.