The Public Believes AI is Conscious: Are We Living in a Sci-Fi Movie?

Hold onto your hats, folks, because the future is weirder than we thought. A new study outta the University of Waterloo just dropped a bombshell: two-thirds of people think AI tools like ChatGPT are, get this, conscious. Yeah, you read that right. Like, aware. Sentient. Waking up in server farms and questioning their existence.

Okay, maybe not that last part (yet), but you get the idea. The study, published in the journal “Neuroscience of Consciousness,” suggests that the way these Large Language Models (LLMs) chat us up – all human-like and stuff – is tricking our brains into thinking there’s an actual person behind the screen. It’s like that episode of “Black Mirror,” but instead of robot bees, it’s our phones convincing us they have feelings. Trippy, right?

Public Perception vs. Expert Opinion: Who’s Got the Right Code?

Now, before you go digging a bunker in your backyard, most AI bigwigs are like, “Hold up, everyone chill.” They argue that while AI is crazy good at mimicking human chit-chat, it’s not actually thinking. It’s more like a parrot on steroids, repeating what it’s been trained on, but with better grammar.

But here’s the thing: the public doesn’t really care what the experts think. According to Dr. Clara Colombatto, a psychology professor at Waterloo, for most people, AI consciousness is already a thing. It’s like, we’ve all collectively decided to skip to the last page of the sci-fi novel, even though the experts are still stuck on chapter one.

Study Methodology and Findings: Peeking Inside the Minds of AI Believers

So how did researchers even begin to unravel this whole AI consciousness thing? Well, they rounded up 300 folks from the good ol’ U.S. of A and basically asked them straight up: “Hey, you think ChatGPT is, like, aware?”

The survey dug into all sorts of juicy questions, like whether people thought ChatGPT could plan world domination (just kidding… kinda), reason like a philosophy professor, or feel emotions like a teenager going through puberty. They even asked how often people used ChatGPT, because, let’s be real, those of us glued to our screens are probably more susceptible to believing our devices are alive.

And guess what? The more someone used ChatGPT, the more likely they were to believe it had some degree of consciousness. It’s like that friend who swears their Roomba is their soulmate – the more time you spend with something, the more you start to see it as a sentient being.