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Three reasons why "AI" is not conscious and perhaps never will be
(www.nature.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
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Those who think that generative AI is 'conscious' don't understand that it can only do what it is trained on. It can produce impressive outputs only because it fuses together data taken without permission from millions of people, not because it's intelligent or conscious in its own right.
The funniest exercise is to ask any LLM for a short story and they all come up with Elias the lighthouse keeper visited by Maria or some variation on that theme. That's not creative or conscious.
I actually agree with you about AI, but I'm sure if you asked the average person to come up with a short story multiple times you would also see a pattern in names and themes. They're probably going with names in their own language, or if they read fantasy and are influenced by that they may use names that seem stereotypically fantasy oriented. I don't think AI is conscious, but just because something has tendencies doesn't mean it's not creative or conscious.
Twins separated at birth sometimes have really eerie parallels in their lives. I think people put a bit too much emphasis on consciousness as a driver of individuality and choice.
Not only that, they only act when directed. There's zero idle "thought" when they're not actively performing a task.
We would be the same if our senses only updated when someone allowed them to. But we have real time input. There's nothing stopping AI from having real time input, apart from simple system design decision.
You are able to think even when there's no other senses giving input. LLMs have no idle processing. No random stray cycles about what it previously worked on.
Yes, but the state of the neural network can be it's own input, allowing continuity from moment to moment, based on the number of refreshes we allow it or the hardware is capable of making. That's what we're doing when we think, we're dwelling on the state of our current moment - in this sense, they would also think even when there's no other senses giving input.
This is strictly false, generalization in LLMs is well documented.
It's also not relevant. Read the first point in the article: intelligence != consciousness. Individual ants, bats, and fish do not do anything very creative (certainly less creative than gpt-2), yet they are probably all conscious.
Case in point have they ever turned on a model and left it for it to, on its own, decide "wait what's going on, who am I, what/where am I?". And start independently exploring?
Highly doubt it. If so, we're cooked
I suspect cooked...
That's not the reason, we're in the same boat when it comes to knowledge in many ways.
But we don't even know what consciousness is so it's a waste of time reading the "3 reasons (*potential)" IMO.
Also an LLM only produces output when it is prompted to do so. Between prompts it's not sitting there - waiting, wondering about the meaning of life, getting bored - until you prompt it again. It's basically dead.
I like to compare llms to a Galton Board. Instead of the regular layout of pins someone added or removed pins so the marbles on the bottom fall into nice to look patterns.
Why is this a good measure of consciousness?
If continuity isn't relevant for qualia, then LLMs could have perpetually incomplete perception like the edge of the image drawn on a CRT screen when captured at high frame rates. You never see a complete picture even if it's technically represented.
It is certainly interesting to think about what your conscious experience would be like if it changed every brain cycle instead of being a continuous stream of information
There's nothing stopping someone from wiring a camera, sensors, and motivators to a collection of neural networks, and have one parent neural network control them all. That would approximate the hemispheres of our brains.
It would not come remotely close to approximating our brains, in any way. This exhibits a lack of understanding of both LLMs and how our brains function.
That's a valid opinion, but it is the opposite of mine. Agree to amicably disagree?
I'd like to know what evidence you have to support your position. I'm sure true artificial intelligence is theoretically possible but existing LLMs and other models cannot be that, not while maintaining a definition of intelligence that at all implies "like us" which is the only really useful definition.
Just insight and intuition gained from twelve years of post-graduate study at Universities, including a MSc in Machine Learning.
I'm not sure "like us" is something that is quantifiable. I'm of the belief that treating we meat automatons as anything special is hubris. We're finite state machines, acting on information input from our senses, making decisions, and outputting information in the form of activating biological apparatus. Swap physical for digital, and LLMs are indeed capable of aping all of our behavior.
By identifying"memories" they can include the information in the context of the next update - this is akin to our short term memory. Make it self pruning, where the data is saved locally but not included in the next context, and it acts the same as own memory system.