The open letter was published alongside a research paper written by Oxford University’s Patrick Butlin and Theodoros Lappas of Athens University, which warns: ‘Recent research suggests that it may be possible to build conscious AI systems now or in the near future.
Fears AI ‘could be made to suffer’ if it becomes conscious We need to think about the welfare of AI as it gets more advanced, dozens of experts and thinkers have said.
‘So one of the things we really have to do if we want to take AI suffering seriously, is understand what would make a conscious AI suffer.
Current discussions may ‘overstate’ where we’re at with consciousness science, and the kinds of AI which might become conscious probably aren’t the ones that are household names, like ChatGPT or new Chinese rival DeepSeek.
For most people, concerns focus on if AI will harm us, rather than if we will harm it, but now an open letter calls for consideration of how we could make conscious machines suffer.
