Once considered a forbidden topic in the AI community, discussions around the concept of AI consciousness are now taking center stage, marking a significant shift since the current AI resurgence began over a decade ago. For example, last year, Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, made headlines claiming the large language model he was developing had become sentient [1]. CEOs of tech companies are now openly asked in media interviews whether they think their AI systems will ever become conscious [2,3].Unfortunately, missing from much of the public discussion is a clear understanding of prior work on consciousness. In particular, in…
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