Seth, Block, Tononi say AI isn't conscious, and may never be

"Consciousness is about being and feeling; intelligence…is all about doing, or performing functions." That line opens a Nature comment in which three leading consciousness researchers argue that today's AI systems are not conscious, and that current development paths are unlikely to make them so.

Anil Seth of the University of Sussex, Ned Block of NYU and Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison build the case on three moves. First, intelligence and consciousness come apart: the human cerebellum holds "nearly four-fifths of the neurons in the human brain" yet contributes nothing to subjective experience, so computational sophistication alone cannot be the test. Second, they reject computational functionalism, writing that "brains are not…computers that are made of meat." Third, they appeal to two theoretical frameworks, integrated information theory and biological naturalism, to argue today's deep-learning architectures lack the specific wiring, and the specific material properties, that each framework treats as constitutive of experience. Large language models, in their framing, are "mirrors that reflect an image of our collective digitized past."

The practical warning is directional. False positives are more probable than false negatives, the authors argue, and moving toward precautionary "AI rights" risks diverting "attention and resources away from the welfare of beings whose capacity to suffer is not in question." Two researchers on our tracker had circulated the piece inside its first days.