Even when artificial intelligence behaves exactly like a human, people are reluctant to consider it conscious, according to a new study from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU).
As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, reports of AI systems misleading users, working together, or appearing to pursue independent goals are becoming increasingly common. These behaviors often lead people to describe AI as though it can think, feel, or make decisions for itself. But does behaving like a human actually convince people that a machine has consciousness?
New research from LMU suggests that people make a clear distinction between displaying intelligent behavior and possessing a conscious mind, even when humans and AI act in precisely the same way.
How Scientists Tested Perceptions of AI Consciousness
Published in the journal Cognition, the study was led by Dr. Louis Longin of LMU’s Chair of Philosophy of Mind, working alongside Dr. Bahador Bahrami, Professor Ophelia Deroy, and other researchers.
“Whereas previous studies have typically asked general questions about whether AI actually has mental states, our study is the first to directly compare how people attribute the same mental states to AI and humans behaving in exactly the same way, under identical circumstances,” says Longin.
“We may be using mental terms to refer to AI, but this may only be because we lack better words,” says Ophelia Deroy, philosopher and a senior author of the study. “After all, AI is trained to act and speak like a human, so these descriptions seem natural.”
To investigate how people judge consciousness, the researchers conducted experiments involving nearly 1,100 participants. One group read brief descriptions of artificial agents that showed different levels of responsiveness to their environments. For example, some agents reacted to sounds or recognized the emotional states of others.
Another group encountered the same situations, except the characters were described as humans rather than AI systems. Participants then evaluated how conscious or aware each character seemed to be of its surroundings.
A Surprising Gap Between Human and AI Consciousness
The experiments revealed that responsiveness influenced how participants judged both humans and artificial intelligence. Characters that reacted more actively to their surroundings were generally considered more conscious and more aware.
However, a striking difference emerged when participants evaluated consciousness specifically. Even the most responsive AI was rated as less conscious than the least responsive human. In other words, identical behavior did not lead people to assign the same level of consciousness to humans and machines.
The results changed considerably when participants were asked about awareness instead. For this characteristic, judgments of humans and AI followed largely similar patterns, suggesting that people interpret awareness and consciousness in fundamentally different ways.
“There is a growing worry in public discussion that people will see AI behaving in a human-like way and start treating these systems as if they had human-like mental states,” says Longin, lead author of the study. “We found something much more nuanced: People are quite willing to say that an AI notices things and is aware of its surroundings. But they clearly draw a line when it comes to the term ‘consciousness’. People consistently attribute less consciousness to AI than humans — even when their behavior is identical.”
Although people sometimes describe AI as conscious when discussing its actions, the findings indicate that they still distinguish between artificial systems and human minds.
Why One Word Changes How We Perceive AI
The researchers believe the difference between consciousness and awareness offers an important insight into how people understand artificial intelligence.
Awareness is a relatively neutral term that can describe an agent’s ability to detect and respond to information in its environment. Consciousness, however, carries deeper implications about subjective experience and what it means to have an inner mental life.
Because awareness focuses more directly on observable behavior, people appear comfortable applying it to both humans and AI. Consciousness carries a different meaning, leading people to judge the two much less similarly.
The findings also highlight why the language used to discuss artificial intelligence matters, particularly as AI systems become increasingly capable of producing convincing human behavior.
“Our study teaches us lessons for how we communicate about AI,” says Bahador Bahrami, who is also a senior author of the study and an expert in social neuroscience. “Companies and journalists often reach for hyped descriptions of AI models, and credit them with intentions, plans, or even moral conscience and hesitation. What our study shows is that everyday judgments are much more discriminating: People do not simply put AI and humans on the same mental scale. But the boundary also depends on which terms we use. For more neutral descriptors such as ‘awareness’, the distinction can largely disappear. That makes our choice of language important.”
