Why Big Tech Wants You to Think AI Is Alive

About this episode

Can AI actually be conscious and why are some of the biggest AI companies in Silicon Valley pushing this idea? SUPPORT MY WORK:  Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at https://www.usermag.co          Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz In this episode of Power User, I talk with Washington Post tech reporter Nitasha Tiku about the growing push inside companies like Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI to study AI consciousness, model welfare, digital minds, and whether systems like Claude could ever experience emotions or suffering.   We discuss Anthropic's research into Claude's preferences, emotions, and introspection, the rise of the AI welfare movement, Silicon Valley's fascination with machine consciousness, and why executives are increasingly talking publicly about the possibility that AI systems could have an inner life.   But there are much bigger questions at stake. What happens if society begins treating AI systems as people? Could chatbots eventually receive rights or legal personhood? Could companies use the idea of AI agency to avoid responsibility for what their products do? And what does all of this mean when people are already form