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No: human-like responses alone do not make people judge an AI system as equally conscious as a person. In five preregistered experiments, UK participants rated human agents as more conscious than artificial agents showing comparable responsiveness. Their awareness ratings, however, rose with responsiveness for both kinds of agent. The studies measured people’s judgments about described agents—not whether AI systems actually have subjective experience.
What did the 2026 study test?
The study, “AI is not as conscious as humans: Essentialism in mental state attributions to artificial systems,” was published online in Cognition on October 1, 2026. Across five preregistered experiments, 1,092 participants in the UK read scenarios about human or artificial agents. The scenarios varied how responsive each agent was to spatial, social, and temporal features. Participants then rated the agents’ consciousness and awareness, either separately or together. Read the paper in Cognition.
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Consciousness judgments retained a human advantage
Even when described as comparably responsive, human agents received higher consciousness ratings than artificial agents. In other words, the human-like behavior described in a scenario did not erase the difference participants attributed to the agent’s kind.
Awareness ratings tracked responsiveness
Ratings of awareness increased as agents became more responsive, whether the agent was described as human or artificial. The authors characterize this as a more functional pattern: participants’ awareness judgments shifted with what an agent did, while consciousness judgments remained more closely associated with whether it was human or artificial.
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Why consciousness and awareness are not interchangeable
In this context, phenomenal consciousness means subjective experience—what it is like to be a system. Responsiveness, by contrast, is behavior that can be described or observed, such as reacting to features of a situation. A system might respond to input in increasingly sophisticated ways without that behavior, by itself, establishing subjective experience.
The distinction matters when interpreting the experiments. Participants’ awareness ratings responded to agents’ behavior, but those ratings are not a direct measure of an AI system’s inner experience. Nor do the findings prove that artificial systems cannot be conscious. They show how people judged agents described in scenarios.
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How does the result compare with the 2024 LLM survey?
A 2024 survey by Christina Colombatto and Stephen M. Fleming asked 300 U.S. residents about consciousness in large language models. A majority were willing to allow some possibility that LLMs have phenomenal consciousness. The authors explained the concept of phenomenal consciousness before asking about it, which may have prompted respondents to consider the possibility. Read the study in Neuroscience of Consciousness.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteOne figure from that survey requires particular care: 23% of participants placed ChatGPT above the midpoint on a scale of human-like experience, under an interpretation of the scale as indicating credence. The authors note that respondents may instead have read the scale as asking about degree. So 23% is not a general measure of how many people believe AI is conscious, and it does not mean that only 23% entertained the possibility.
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The two studies are not a direct contradiction. The 2024 survey asked about the possible phenomenal experience of ChatGPT after explaining the term. The 2026 experiments asked participants to compare human and artificial agents in written scenarios and rate consciousness and awareness. The populations, prompts, measures, and comparison designs differed.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Do people increasingly describe AI in human-like terms?
A 2025 study in Communications Psychology analyzed more than 12,000 metaphors from a nationally representative U.S. sample. Responses were collected between May 2023 and August 2024, and the study found that descriptions of AI became more human-like and warm after ChatGPT’s introduction. Read the metaphor study.
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That finding concerns how people describe AI, not whether they believe it has subjective experience. The study examined broad public conceptions rather than every specific type of AI tool and did not assess participants’ AI literacy.
Why chatbots matter to this question
Chatbots are a familiar reference point in public thinking about AI. In a Pew Research Center survey of 5,119 U.S. adults fielded February 17–23, 2026, 29% named chatbots as the first technology that came to mind when asked what they associated with AI. That statistic describes what people associate with AI; it does not measure beliefs about consciousness. Read Pew Research Center’s findings.
What these studies can—and cannot—tell us
Together, the findings show that people can recognize responsive or human-like behavior without necessarily attributing human-level consciousness to an artificial agent. They also show that answers depend on what researchers ask: a comparison between human and artificial agents is different from asking whether ChatGPT might have subjective experience.
All of these results concern human descriptions, ratings, or associations. They do not establish whether any present or future AI system is conscious. As Louis Longin, lead author of the 2026 study, put it in a news release, “There is a growing worry in public discussion that people will see AI behaving in a human-like way and start treating these systems as if they had human-like mental states.” That statement describes the concern motivating the study, not a conclusion that everyone responds to AI that way. Read the LMU news release via EurekAlert!.
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