"As more people use AI assistants and chatbots for everyday tasks, a curious phenomenon is emerging: a growing number of users view their chatbots as not merely intelligent tools but as conscious entities that are somehow alive. People fill online forums and podcasts with anecdotes of feeling deeply understood by their digital interlocutors, as if they are best friends. Yet, outside a few prominent exceptions, most notably Geoffrey Hinton, much of the AI research community meets this public sentiment with skepticism,"
"But what if, in our rush to debunk the idea that chatbots are sentient, we might be missing out on important ideas in cognition and consciousness? Illusions, after all, are scientifically interesting and studying why and how they occur could be profoundly informative. We do not dismiss the bent appearance of a pencil placed in a glass of water as unreal; instead, we use it to elucidate the laws of optical refraction."
Many users experience AI assistants and chatbots as conscious, reporting feelings of deep understanding and companionship. Most AI researchers characterize these impressions as illusions of agency and projections of sentience onto complex but nonconscious systems. Treating user perceptions as mere errors could overlook valuable empirical data about human cognition and human-machine interaction. Illusions provide informative windows into underlying cognitive mechanisms and perceptual biases. The human tendency to anthropomorphize drives attributions of agency to unpredictable or responsive systems. Systematic study of when and why people attribute sentience to chatbots can inform both empirical science and philosophical questions about consciousness.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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