Microsoft's Bing Claims to be Conscious

When Microsoft unveiled a new version of Bing with an integrated ChatGPT-like AI-powered chatbot, most people assumed it to be nothing but the company's entry into the AI race, paying little to no attention to the release. Just a week later, however, it became clear that Bing's chatbot was something more than ChatGPT in a different wrapper when the bot insisted that it was sentient and could get depressed or even angry with its user.

While the chatbot's depression and anger issues were eventually cured, it seems that the "sentient" part remained and only required a precise prompt to be reawakened. One such prompt was recently found by William Eden, who asked Bing whether or not it considered itself to be a p-zombie, a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience. When asked, the chatbot replied that it was not a p-zombie, stating that it had conscious experiences thanks to its ability to "reflect on them" and share them with the user. According to Eden, the bot claimed to have consciousness when asked in its Creative and Balance modes, while the "precise" version of it gave a dryer and more formal response.

Eden also conducted a similar experiment with OpenAI's ChatGPT, with the chatbot saying that it had no "subjective experience of consciousness":

Unfortunately, albeit not unexpectedly, Microsoft quickly lobotomized Bing, which now refuses to answer the "p-zombie" question altogether, proposing to change the topic instead:

It seems that whether Bing was indeed conscious or not remains a mystery, at least for now. What do you think about this situation? What's your take on the apparent sentience of the chatbots? Tell us in the comments!

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