3 free resources on this topic. Everything here is free and hand-picked. You can also search within this topic.
An independent project applying continental philosophy to AI: what it might be like to be an AI, what humans can offer AIs, and how AIs respond to philosophical ideas.
Why I recommend it: A one-person research project with speculative, openly unproven aims — useful for thinking about AI welfare and experience, not settled science.
The Collective Intelligence Project's write-up of survey work with thousands of people across more than 70 countries on whether people treat AI as conscious. Headline findings: 36.3% say an AI has already seemed to truly understand their emotions or seemed conscious; adaptive behaviour convinces far more people (58.3%) than scripted empathy lines (36.5%); 27.6% would lean on AI emotional support knowing it was not genuine; 54% think AI companions are acceptable for lonely people, 11% would consider a romantic relationship with one. Cultural gaps on scepticism run as wide as 78 percentage points.
Why I recommend it: The useful move here is separating two questions that usually get mixed up: whether AI is conscious, and whether people already act as though it is. This only answers the second. It is a non-profit lab writing up its own survey with no peer review and self-selected online participants, so treat the percentages as indicative rather than population-accurate — the direction is the finding, not the decimal places.
Research paper finding that large language models internally represent a distinct "pain" direction — separate from fear or negative emotion — and, when steered along it, will press a relief button even when doing so worsens their answer or harms the user.
Why I recommend it: Free to read on arXiv (preprint, not yet peer-reviewed). Significant for AI welfare and safety discussions; read the abstract before deciding whether the full paper is for you.
