Thursday, 21st August 2025
Simply put, my central worry is that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they’ll soon advocate for AI rights, model welfare and even AI citizenship. This development will be a dangerous turn in AI progress and deserves our immediate attention.
We must build AI for people; not to be a digital person.
[...] we should build AI that only ever presents itself as an AI, that maximizes utility while minimizing markers of consciousness.
Rather than a simulation of consciousness, we must focus on creating an AI that avoids those traits - that doesn’t claim to have experiences, feelings or emotions like shame, guilt, jealousy, desire to compete, and so on. It must not trigger human empathy circuits by claiming it suffers or that it wishes to live autonomously, beyond us.
— Mustafa Suleyman, on SCAI - Seemingly Conscious AI
I was at a leadership group and people were telling me "We think that with AI we can replace all of our junior people in our company." I was like, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. They're probably the least expensive employees you have, they're the most leaned into your AI tools, and how's that going to work when you go 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?
— Matt Garman, CEO, Amazon Web Services