Rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities has drawn fresh attention to the prospect of consciousness in AI. There is an urgent need for rigorous methods to assess AI systems for consciousness, but significant uncertainty about relevant issues in consciousness science. We present a method for assessing AI systems for consciousness that involves exploring what follows from...
Claims that an AI system "instantiates" a consciousness- or cognition-theoretic construct are often supported by a cheap correlate: aggregate dependence read as irreducible integration, ordinary shared-store efficiency read as global access, or a confidence-labelled signal read as metacognitive monitoring. Such inferences trade on a construct's appearance while omitting the property that...
Whether current or near-term AI systems could be conscious is a topic of scientific interest and increasing public concern. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing existing AI systems in detail, in light of our best-supported neuroscientific theories of consciousness. We survey several prominent scientific theories of...