[This essay from Vox makes clear how difficult it is for us to resist perceiving an artificial intelligence as a “conscious, thinking being,” i.e., experiencing medium as social actor (MASA) presence. Of course it’s only a presence misperception if the AI is indeed not conscious, and while the author agrees that we shouldn’t base our decisions about an AI’s consciousness on what it tell us, she notes that experts have few effective tools for making the determination. A New York Times story from September 2023 titled, “How to Tell if Your A.I. Is Conscious,” with the subheading, “In a new report, scientists offer a list of measurable qualities that might indicate the presence of some presence in a machine,” expands on the challenges of determining consciousness and concludes this way:
“We do this kind of research already with animals, requiring careful study to make the most basic claim that other species have experiences similar to our own, or even understandable to us.… read more. “This AI says it has feelings. It’s wrong. Right?”