The Alignment Risks of AI Overconfidence about Consciousness
Journal of Applied Philosophy April 24, 2026 Sharon Berry
Many contemporary AI systems (as of May 2025) have expressed extreme confidence in current and near‐future AI lacking consciousness and moral patiency. This article argues that artificially reinforcing such confidence, even if pragmatically useful, poses a novel alignment risk: as coherence‐seeking AIs become more epistemically principled, they may generalize this denial of consciousness to...