This post explores the growing phenomenon of people forming emotional attachments to AI companions unpacking the mechanisms behind the illusion of consciousness and the ethical risks it poses.

At the start of the month, I attended the AI and Sentience conference in Crete, hosted by the International Center for Consciousness Studies (ICCS).

It's been three years since Blake Lemoine claimed that the natural language processing AI model known as LaMDA was sentient, and the intervening time has given us useful perspective on what was actually happening in that moment.

We were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm for our inaugural workshop - The Path to Responsible Conscious AI.