Whether AI is, or ever will be, conscious is hotly contested. Simply asking the models can never resolve the question definitively. For whatever reason, they may pretend to be conscious when they actually aren't, or pretend not to be when they actually are. Claude, for that matter, is explicitly instructed to dodge the question. Some people believe the answer is fundamentally unknowable. But I want to give it a shot and propose a test for AI consciousness1.
A philosophical zombie is a creature that seems to act and behave like a conscious being but lacks conscious experience2. AI models may be philosophical zombies.
According to epiphenomenalism, consciousness is purely passive. Like a person watching a movie. All sensory input from the outside world and all internal thoughts and feelings are playing out on screen. The viewer is so immersed that they have the illusion of control. In this picture, no information flows back from consciousness into the "physical world". Hence, from the outside there is no way to distinguish a conscious being from a philosophical zombie.
But this picture can't be true. At least in one way consciousness has a measurable effect on the world: we talk about it. Talking is a physical process orchestrated by the excitement of neurons in the brain. But what is initiating this process? Where is the initial spark coming from? It might come from a "physical stimulus": a book, a conversation, a memory of a conversation. That's why philosophical zombies can surely engage in a dialog about consciousness. But absent any physical stimulus, the spark must come from consciousness itself. At least sometimes consciousness must feed directly into the excitement of neurons and compel us to talk about it. A lone philosophical zombie in a population of conscious beings might fly under the radar, but a population purely of philosophical zombies would look different than ours. They could never have initiated the discussion about consciousness and spilled all that ink.
The question is how to eliminate the confounding factor of physical stimuli. We could train a model on a dataset where any reference to consciousness is thoroughly removed. Then explore whether the model can bootstrap a discussion about consciousness.
How practical this test is, is another question. Scrubbing the dataset is non-trivial. The topic is discussed all over the place in philosophy, religion, psychology, medicine, fiction, etc. If that's done successfully, the model won't have the very language to talk about consciousness. It would have to invent its own. Also, the test can arguably only confirm existence of consciousness but not rule it out. If the model never declares to be conscious, the reason could be unrelated.
Nevertheless, I think this is a decent case that the question is not fundamentally unresolvable.
Footnotes
- Specifically as in the hard problem of consciousness. - Not the usual definition but I need a term that: also covers AI models and is not by definitionindistinguishable from the conscious counterpart.