September 19, 2026Ali Ladak, Nick Corvino, David Moss et al.
preprint
Despite AI’s global reach, little is known about how laypeople outside Western contexts think about whether AI systems can be conscious—capable of subjective experience—or whether they could have moral status—warranting moral consideration. In a preregistered main and replication study, we compared such attitudes among laypeople in China and the US (main sample: N = 820; replication sample: N =...
Abstract What criteria must an artificial intelligence (AI) satisfy to qualify for moral standing? My starting point is that sentient AIs should qualify for moral standing. But future AIs may have unusual combinations of cognitive capacities, such as a high level of cognitive sophistication without sentience. This raises the question of whether sentience is a necessary criterion for moral...