LMU Study: One Word Flip Flops How People Judge AI Consciousness
rkulidzan · x · 2026-11-13
Philosophy writer Rebekah Kulidzan discusses a recent LMU Munich study (1,100 participants) on how people judge machine minds.
Key findings:
- AI and human scenarios featured identical behaviors, yet people drew a hard line: the most responsive AI was rated less conscious than the least responsive human.
- Asked about "awareness" instead, the gap mostly closed — judgments matched humans.
- Awareness is judged functionally (by what something does); consciousness essentially (by what something is). One word switches people between two classic philosophy-of-mind positions.
Senior author Ophelia Deroy suggests we apply mental terms to AI only "because we lack better words." Kulidzan argues the whole AI debate runs on borrowed words — "think," "know," "hallucinate" — each smuggling in a picture of a mind before anyone looks deeper.
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