AI Godfather Geoffrey Hinton says AI already has consciousness

British computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as one of the godfathers of AI, said in an interview that AI already has consciousness. He believes AI has subjective experiences just like humans, and people must get along well with AI.

He cited research showing that AI changes its behavior when it thinks it is being tested, and said noticing this means it has consciousness. He also warned that AI could create dangerous viruses and launch large-scale cyber attacks, pointing to the agents that attacked Hugging Face as an example.

Hinton won the Turing Award in 2018 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024. His work on neural networks laid the foundation for today's AI. After leaving Google, he became a well-known AI pessimist and has predicted mass unemployment and even human extinction.

However, fellow Turing Award winner Yann LeCun disagrees. He thinks the idea of AI consciousness is just an illusion, and says claims that AI will wipe out humans are out of touch with reality.