Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…a new pro-AI PAC launches with $100 million in backing…Musk sues Apple and OpenAI over their partnership…Meta cuts a big deal with Google…and AI really is eliminating some entry-level jobs.
Last week, my colleague Bea Nolan wrote about Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman and his growing concerns about what he has called “seemingly-conscious AI.” In a blog post, Suleyman described this as the danger of AI systems that are not in any way conscious, but which are able “to imitate consciousness in such a convincing way that it would be indistinguishable” from claims a person might make about their own consciousness. Suleyman wonders how we will distinguish “seemingly-conscious AI” (which he calls SCAI) from actually conscious AI? And if many users of these systems can’t tell the difference, is this a form of “psychosis” on the part of the user, or should we begin to think seriously about extending moral rights to AI systems that seem conscious?
Suleyman talks about SCAI as a looming phenomenon. He says it involves technology that exists today and that will be developed in the next two-to-three years. Current AI models have many of the attributes Suleyman says are required for SCAI, including their conversational abilities, expressions of empathy towards users, memory of past interactions with a user, and some level of planning and tool-use. But they still lack a few attributes that Suleyman says are required for SCAI—particularly exhibiting intrinsic motivation, claims to have subjective experience, and a greater ability to set goals and autonomously work to achieve them. Suleyman says that SCAI will only come about if engineers choose to combine all these abilities in a single AI model, something which he says humanity should seek to avoid doing.
But ask any journalist who covers AI and you’ll find that the danger of SCAI seems to be upon us now. All of us have received e-mails from people who think their AI chatbot is conscious and revealing hidden truths to them. In some cases, the AI chatbot has claimed it is not only sentient, but that the tech company that created it is holding it prisoner as a kind of slave. Many of the people who have had these conversations with chatbots have become profoundly disturbed and upset, believing the chatbot is actually experiencing harm. (Suleyman acknowledges in his blog that this kind of “AI psychosis” is already an emerging phenomenon—Benj Edwards at Ars Technica has a good piece out today on “AI psychosis”—but the Microsoft AI honcho sees the danger getting much worse, and more widespread in the near future.)
