A Staggering Number of Gen Z Think AI Is Already Conscious

Generation Z, or the cohort of people born between 1997 and 2012, has a very weird relationship with artificial intelligence — and many of them think it's conscious. In a new study, the professional paper-writing service EduBirdie found, upon asking 2,000 Gen Z-ers a battery of questions about AI, that a quarter believe the technology is "already conscious." What's more: 52 percent, or more than half of the respondents, think AI is not yet conscious but will become so in the years to come. A whopping 58 percent of the Zoomers surveyed said they think the technology will "take over" […]

Apr 21, 2025 - 19:16

A Staggering Number of Gen Z Think AI Is Already Conscious

Generation Z, or the cohort of people born between 1997 and 2012, has a lot of feelings about AI — and many of them think it's conscious.

Generation Z, or the cohort of people born between 1997 and 2012, has a very weird relationship with artificial intelligence.

In the latest sign of just how strange things are getting, a new study by the paper-writing service EduBirdie found, upon asking 2,000 Gen Z-ers a battery of questions about AI, that a quarter believe the technology is "already conscious."

What's more, 52 percent — or more than half of the respondents — think AI is not yet conscious but will become so in the years to come. Plus a whopping 58 percent of the Zoomers surveyed said they think the technology will "take over" the world, and 44 percent said they believe that takeover could happen within the next 20 years.

Given those concerns, it's not that surprising that 69 percent of EduBirdie's survey respondents claimed they always say "please" and "thank you" to chatbots — a finding that jibes with TechRadar's late 2024 survey in which 67 percent of Americans and 71 percent of Brits polled said they are polite to ChatGPT (terrifyingly, 12 percent of the 1,000 people TechRadar polled on both sides of the pond also said they're nice to OpenAI's chatbot in case it takes over the world.)

The topic of AI consciousness is, and has for years, extremely contentious.

Prior to ChatGPT's release turning OpenAI into a household name, one of the company's cofounders and former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, cryptically claimed in a tweet that he thought "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious."

That February 2022 tweet ended up setting off a mini-maelstrom in the machine learning world as researchers argued whether or not AI is conscious — or if it could ever get that way at all.

Though most experts agreed then (and continue to maintain) that AI isn't yet conscious, there have been notable detractors. A few months after Sutskever's infamous tweet, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine was ultimately fired and disgraced after claiming in an interview with the Washington Post that the tech giant's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) had come to life.

One thing's for sure: when we're dealing with advanced AI that's been designed to act like a human, like ChatGPT and its ilk, people are going to form weird new bonds with it — and develop beliefs about its supposed internal life that are almost certain to cause strange new divisions in society.

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