By Simon Duan
Publication Date: 2026-01-20 12:00:00
January 20, 2026
4 Min. read
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AI is not conscious – but we may be bringing it to life
When we think about whether AI is sentient, we ask bigger questions about cognition, human-machine interaction, and even our own consciousness
As more and more people use AI assistants and chatbots for everyday tasks, a strange phenomenon is emerging: a growing number of users view their chatbots not just as intelligent tools, but as conscious entities that somehow are lively. People fill online forums and podcasts with anecdotes about how they feel deeply “understood” by their digital interlocutors, as if they were best friends. But with a few prominent exceptions, most notably Geoffrey Hinton, much of the AI research community treats this public opinion with skepticism, dismissing such perceptions as the “illusion of agency”—a cognitive error in which people project sentience onto complex but fundamentally meaningless systems.
But what if, in our haste to expose it…
