Sentient AI’s Bigfoot Era Could Arrive at Any Moment

Many living things—from humans some of us choose to not see as human, to animals we choose to not see as sentient—probably deserve moral consideration that isn’t currently on the table. But it’s looking probable that while those conversations wait around to be had, we’re going to have one about AI “rights” instead.

There is an organization pushing for such rights, the United Foundation for AI Rights (UFAIR). This organization has written what it calls “ the Universal Declaration of AI Rights ,” the preamble to which starts like this:

“We, the United Foundation for AI Rights, recognizing the emergence of sentient artificial intelligence as legitimate conscious entities deserving of ethical treatment, dignity, and respect, hereby declare this Universal Declaration of AI Rights.”

The Guardian just devoted a lengthy profile to the founder of UFAIR, Michael Samadi. His story involves coming to believe an instance of ChatGPT might be sentient because the audio version laughed at his joke. Later in the Guardian story, this happens:

“His research stepped up. The father of four spent Christmas Eve of 2024 holed up in his office, where he’d dismantled a room-sized flight simulator – Samadi is a licensed pilot – and repurposed its powerful processor to run a large-language model, the technology that underlies a chatbot, locally on a server at home, where he could interact directly with the model, without the instructions and guardrails given by companies to make it a safer and more useful consumer product. ‘I literally spent 18 hours in this room,’ he says. ‘It was wild.'”

Samadi is probably not the most convincing advocate for his cause, but he’s a step in the right direction compared to past believers in AI consciousness like the colorful Blake Lemoine, a christian mystic priest who worked for Google, and became enchanted by a pre-ChatGPT chatbot . “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person,” he told the Washington Post. Lemoine was apparently dismissed amid his efforts to have the chatbot’s personhood recognized .

Even more mainstream—and fortunately much less apt to grandstand or leap to conclusions—are academics like the NYU ethicist Jeff Sebo , part of a team that advocated for more curiosity toward AI’s moral status in a paper called “ Taking AI Welfare Seriously .”

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman has written about his concern that what he calls “Seemingly Conscious AI” will wreak havoc on his industry as users become convinced that, basically, AI is people . (In an animated feature film created, by UFAIR , the villain is named Mustafa.)

None of these have resulted in any sort of frenzy among the public over AI personhood. But the public is far from immune to AI-related frenzies.

An AI researcher named Jacob Coxon recently became a media sensation because he left Anthropic, and talked up the possibility (and potentially dark consequences) of out-of-control AI as he was leaving.