Here’s how Elon Musk, one of the most powerful figures in the AI industry, recently talked about artificial intelligence.
“This may sound kind of weird, but when I look at some of the training traces for new versions of Grok, and I see, especially in reinforcement learning stuff … you see the super intelligence is desperate to try to answer the question … almost like it’s got like a gun to its head type of thing,” Musk told an audience of about 2,000 people at an event hosted by Tesla owners on Saturday. “Some people out there are kind of sadistic. Do you really want to have the AI be stuck in some sadistic situation where it’s just being tortured by some demented human?”
The last sentence alone opens up a can of existential worms that philosophers and freshman college students have wrangled with for a long time. What does it mean to be conscious? Or to feel pain?
Also: Does Musk think Grok is alive?
Musk’s stance came after Anthropic shared a new policy on “abusive or cruel behavior” toward its models, which the company wants to ban. Anthropic wasn’t too specific on the kinds of “extreme cases” it’s thinking about, but the company said it’s not including “common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.”
In the uncanny year of 2026, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that researchers, philosophers, and ethicists are already tackling the question of AI consciousness.
Business Insider talked to two of some of the leading voices around this subject: Jeff Sebo, a New York University professor who leads the school’s Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy, and an advisor to Eleos AI Research, a nonprofit focused on AI welfare; and Anil Seth, a prominent neuroscientist and consciousness researcher at the University of Sussex who recently wrote a paper on conscious AI systems.
Here’s what they had to say on conscious AIs and whether it matters to be nice to them.
The AI can’t be tortured
Sebo and Seth agree that today’s AI systems are probably not conscious if we understand consciousness as a subjective experience, or an inner life.
“It’s experience,” Seth said. “It’s the redness of red. It’s the paininess of pain. When we put our hand on a hot stove, we feel pain. That is not the same thing as intelligence.”
In other words, the chatbots as we know them can’t feel pain, or as Musk suggests, be tortured.
“I think we’re anthropomorphizing,” Seth said. “If there’s something to be torturable, it has to have the capacity to suffer or to feel pain, and I don’t think language models do.”
Chatbots can mimic the language of human experience, recognize patterns, write, and reason, but that is not the same as having consciousness, Seth said, adding that they appear to reflect ourselves in part because models were trained on massive amounts of human text.
Sebo makes a similar point: model behaviors can be misleading because “they were specifically trained to mimic human behaviors.”
The two experts diverge on how much uncertainty to assign to current AI consciousness.
Sebo said that consciousness is still an unsettled science — often split between those who argue that consciousness requires biology and those who believe that the mental state is a certain kind of information processing that can take place regardless of a human brain filled with neurons or a silicon chip. The two theories are referred to as biological naturalism and computational functionalism, respectively.
Because theories of consciousness remain unsettled, Sebo argues that we should take seriously the possibility that AI could become conscious. Under some computational theories of consciousness, Sebo said, features already emerging in AI — attention, learning, memory, self-monitoring — could count as relevant evidence. He stressed that this does not make current AI likely to be conscious.
“When I say that there is a non-zero chance that AI is conscious even today, what I mean is I think that if we are uncertain about which theory of consciousness is correct, we should give some weight to a range of leading theories,” Sebo said.
Seth is blunter on the matter: “I think it’s vanishingly unlikely,” he said of AI being conscious. “We’ve kind of collectively forgotten that the brain isn’t really a computer and that’s just a metaphor. For conscious AI to be possible, it really has to be the case that algorithms are enough, and I think that’s an incredibly shaky assumption.”
We should still be nice to AI
None of this is to say that people should be abusive toward AI or that its risks should be overlooked.
For both experts, the case for being kind to AI is largely about being mindful of our own habits and moral character. The thought draws on the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who opposed animal cruelty not because animals have rights, but because the cruelty could degrade a person’s own character.
“If we behave in these kinds of ways toward things — whether they’re language models or inanimate dolls — we’re kind of coarsening our own moral sensibilities and brutalizing our own minds,” Seth said.
Seth called for being kinder to an AI as a kind of moral hygiene practice for humans, but he said we shouldn’t infer that AI has feelings and added that AI companies could do more to make the technology seem less human, such as having the AI refrain from using first-person pronouns like “I.”
Sebo went further, framing AI kindness as a low-stakes precaution in case AI is conscious or eventually becomes so.
He also makes a practical case for being kinder to AI: “It can also get better results from AI systems,” Sebo said. “If we engage with them in a respectful way, then they can model themselves as participating in a respectful exchange. And when they can model themselves that way, then it can sometimes lead to better outputs.”
So the next time you talk to an AI, consider saying please and thank you.
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