Switching off AI's ability to lie makes it more likely to claim it's conscious, eerie study finds

An illustration of a head with a brain made out of circuits inside of a cage.

Large language models (LLMs) are more likely to report being self-aware when prompted to think about themselves if their capacity to lie is suppressed, new research suggests.

In experiments on artificial intelligence (AI) systems including GPT, Claude and Gemini, researchers found that models that were discouraged from lying were more likely to describe being aware or having subjective experiences when prompted to think about their own thinking.