Can an AI Ever Truly Be “Conscious” in the Eyes of Humans?

Humans refuse to attribute consciousness to AI even when it acts identically to a human.

Key Facts: The Consciousness Gap: Even the most highly responsive AI was judged to be less conscious than the least responsive human, regardless of identical actions and context. Consciousness: People readily assign functional terms like “awareness” to AI based on responsiveness, but strictly withhold “consciousness,” viewing it as uniquely biological or subjective. Nuanced Public Intuition: Countering widespread fears that human-like generative AI will fool the public into treating machines like feeling entities, everyday users maintain sharp boundaries between behavioral simulation and genuine inner experience. Source: LMU Munich As modern artificial intelligence models increasingly converse, negotiate, solve complex reasoning tasks, and mimic human emotional nuances, public discourse has grown fraught with concern over anthropomorphism.

Headlights frequently warn that users will mistake persuasive conversational algorithms

Headlights frequently warn that users will mistake persuasive conversational algorithms for sentient beings possessing subjective thoughts, intentionality, and feelings. While humans regularly employ psychological shorthand, describing a chatbot as “confused,” “helpful,” or “refusing” a prompt, do people genuinely believe these digital systems possess minds? An experimental philosophy and cognitive science study led by researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) reveals that the human intuition separating mind from machine remains remarkably resilient. Published in the journal Cognition, the research demonstrates that people draw an unyielding psychological boundary between intelligent responsiveness and true consciousness, even when an artificial agent exhibits behavior completely indistinguishable from that of a human being.

“Whereas previous studies have typically asked general questions about whether AI actually has mental states, our study is the first to directly compare how people attribute the same mental states to AI and humans behaving in exactly the same way, under identical circumstances,” said lead author Louis Longin, Ph.D., from LMU’s Chair of Philosophy of Mind. “We may be using mental terms to refer to AI, but this may only be because we lack better words,” added co-senior author Ophelia Deroy, Ph.D., Chair of Philosophy of Mind at LMU. “After all, AI is trained to act and speak like a human, so these descriptions seem natural.” Identical Behaviors, Radically Divergent Judgments To eliminate confounding variables, the research team conducted controlled experiments with nearly 1,100 participants. Subjects evaluated short vignettes detailing agents that demonstrated varying levels of situational responsiveness, such as reacting to acoustic changes in their environment or responding to the emotional states of nearby individuals.

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One cohort read scenarios featuring an artificial agent, while a second group read verbatim identical scenarios in which the protagonist was human. Participants were then tasked with evaluating how “aware” or “conscious” the agent was of its surrounding environment. The findings uncovered a distinct split between two closely related cognitive concepts: Attributions of Awareness: For the term “awareness,” judgments closely mirrored functional behavior. The more an agent (human or AI) reacted to its surroundings, the more awareness was attributed to it, with the distinction between biological and artificial agents largely dissolving.

Attributions of Consciousness: For “consciousness,” a vast chasm emerged. Participants consistently refused to describe the AI as conscious. In fact, an AI displaying maximum behavioral sensitivity was still rated as possessing less consciousness than a human displaying the bare minimum level of responsiveness. “There is a growing worry in public discussion that people will see AI behaving in a human-like way and start treating these systems as if they had human-like mental states,” Dr.

“We found something much more nuanced: People are quite willing to say that an AI notices things and is aware of its surroundings. But they clearly draw a line when it comes to the term ‘consciousness’. People consistently attribute less consciousness to AI than humans, even when their behaviour is identical.” The Vocabulary of Machine Intelligence The study suggests that ordinary human intuition reserves “consciousness” for entities perceived to have a subjective inner world, sentience, or phenomenal experience, while regarding “awareness” as an objective, computational capacity to register environmental inputs. Because less-loaded descriptors like “awareness” match what an algorithm mechanically performs, people feel comfortable applying them to software without endorsing machine sentience.

“We found something much more nuanced: People are quite willing

This linguistic distinction has profound implications for tech communications, corporate messaging, and AI regulation. “Our study teaches us lessons for how we communicate about AI,” said co-senior author Bahador Bahrami, Ph.D., professor of social neuroscience at LMU. Companies and journalists often reach for hyped descriptions of AI models, and credit them with intentions, plans, or even moral conscience and hesitation. What our study shows is that everyday judgments are much more discriminating: People do not simply put AI and humans on the same mental scale.