One of the persistent questions in our brave new world of generative AI: If a chatbot is conversant like a person, if it reasons and behaves like one, then is it possibly conscious like a person? Geoffrey Hinton, a recent Nobel Prize winner and one of the so-called godfathers of AI, told the journalist Andrew Marr earlier this year that AI has become so advanced and adept at reasoning that “we’re now creating beings.” Hinton links an AI’s ability to “think” and act on behalf of a person to consciousness: The difference between the organic neurons in our head and the synthetic neural networks of a chatbot is effectively meaningless, he said: “They are alien intelligences.”

Many people dismiss the idea, because chatbots frequently make embarrassing mistakes—glue on pizza, anyone?—and becaus

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