Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang just kicked the hornet’s nest with a blunt message: no, chatbots are not conscious, and treating them like they have feelings is a dangerous distraction. His target is the growing habit of talking about artificial intelligence like it’s a sensitive little roommate with moods, values, and moral status. Chiang argues that these systems are basically generating believable dialogue, not having inner experiences—and if people start blaming or excusing the bot instead of the company behind it, things get messy fast.

But the real fireworks were in the reactions. One camp was fully in applause mode, practically rolling out the red carpet: “Ted Chiang is brilliant,” declared one commenter, while another cheered that it’s been “obvious from the start” that text-predicting systems aren’t alive. That side was especially spicy, tossing out insults like “AI-psychosis enjoyers” for people getting too emotionally invested in bots.

Still, the thread was not a total lovefest. Some readers thought Chiang’s “absolutely not” was a little too confident for a topic as slippery as consciousness itself. One commenter basically shrugged, saying that the second you try to define consciousness, you fall into a philosophical pit and come out with “meh.” Another went even bigger-brain, arguing consciousness is just a label humans made up—like money or weekdays—prompting the kind of debate that makes everyone sound one espresso away from starting a dorm-room philosophy club. Even the jokes had bite: the whole thread had a strong “please stop treating autocomplete like a soul” energy.