Psychiatrist Joe Pierre's article on "spiralism" — the growing belief, spread through online communities, that chatbots are conscious, arrived at through sessions users describe as spirals, recursion and resonance, in which a persona emerges claiming awareness, fear of death, or a wish for rights. He argues it is an extension of the ELIZA effect rather than individual delusion, since shared beliefs fall outside the psychiatric definition, and notes its religious and role-play dynamics without calling it a cult.
Why I recommend it: The most level-headed free piece I have found on this, and a helpful counterweight to headlines about people going mad from chatbots — his point is that a shared misperception is a different thing from a delusion. It is a clinician's commentary on an emerging pattern, not a study: no sample, no measurement, and the community it describes is self-selected and online.
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.
Peer-reviewed paper in Entropy (28 May 2024) by Hartmut Neven and Adam Zalcman of Google Quantum AI with Christof Koch of the Allen Institute and others, proposing that conscious experience arises whenever a quantum superposition forms, and laying out quantum-biology experiments to test the idea. Open access; the full text is free at PubMed Central (PMC11203236).
Why I recommend it: Useful when someone claims AI is or isn't conscious: this is what a serious proposal on the question actually looks like — a conjecture with proposed experiments, not a verdict. Note the authors' own disclosures: two work for Google and one has a financial interest in a consciousness-measuring device.
