AI official rejects notion of AI consciousness debate

The head of artificial intelligence at Microsoft is pushing back against efforts to create seemingly conscious machines, saying only living creatures can truly experience awareness.

Mustafa Suleyman told CNBC during an interview at the AfroTech Conference in Houston this week that researchers should abandon work aimed at building AI systems that appear conscious. He called it the wrong approach entirely.

“I don’t think that is work that people should be doing,” Suleyman said at the conference where he gave a keynote speech. “If you ask the wrong question, you end up with the wrong answer. I think it’s totally the wrong question.”

As Microsoft’s leading figure in artificial intelligence, Suleyman has become a prominent critic of efforts to develop AI services that could make people believe the technology can suffer or feel emotions. Last year, he wrote “The Coming Wave,” a book examining dangers posed by AI and similar emerging technologies. In August, he published an essay arguing for building AI to help people rather than imitate them.

Growing market for AI companions sparks debate

This conversation unfolds amid a competitive race among tech companies to create AI companions, including offerings from Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI. The matter becomes increasingly intricate as the generative AI sector, spearheaded by Sam Altman’s OpenAI, pursues artificial general intelligence, systems capable of human-level cognitive performance.

Altman said in August that artificial general intelligence isn’t a particularly helpful term anymore. He said models are simply improving rapidly, and people will depend on them for increasingly more tasks.

For Suleyman, separating growing AI capabilities from any possibility of human feelings matters deeply.

“Our physical experience of pain is something that makes us very sad and feel terrible, but the AI doesn’t feel sad when it experiences ‘pain,'” Suleyman explained. “It’s a very, very important distinction. It’s really just creating the perception, the seeming narrative of experience and of itself and of consciousness, but that is not what it’s actually experiencing. Technically you know that because we can see what the model is doing.”

He pointed to biological naturalism, a theory from philosopher John Searle stating that consciousness requires a living brain’s biological processes.

“The reason we give people rights today is because we don’t want to harm them, because they suffer. They have a pain network, and they have preferences which involve avoiding pain,” Suleyman said. “These models don’t have that. It’s just a simulation.”

Suleyman acknowledged that studying consciousness remains a developing science. He didn’t call for blocking others from researching the topic, recognizing that different organizations have different goals. However, he stressed his strong opposition to the concept.

“They’re not conscious,” he said. “So it would be absurd to pursue research that investigates that question, because they’re not and they can’t be.”

Microsoft takes different path than competitors

Suleyman is traveling to speak publicly about risks involved in pursuing AI consciousness. Before Houston, he appeared at the Paley International Council Summit in Silicon Valley last week.

There, he announced Microsoft won’t create chatbots for sexual content, contrasting with competitors. As reported by Cryptopolitan, Altman revealed in October that ChatGPT now lets adult users have sexual conversations, while xAI offers a provocative anime companion.

“You can basically buy those services from other companies, so we’re making decisions about what places that we won’t go,” Suleyman said again at AfroTech.

Speaking at AfroTech, Suleyman said he chose Microsoft partly because of its history, stability, and wide technological reach. CEO Satya Nadella personally recruited him.

“The other thing to say is that Microsoft needed to be self-sufficient in AI,” he said. Nadella started a mission 18 months ago to ensure the company could train its own models completely in-house using its own data.

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