COULD OUR AI SYSTEMS ALREADY BE CONSCIOUS?

For centuries, we've dreamt about what it would mean to wake up the machine.

Now, leading researchers believe it's happening.

What am I?

For generations we’ve imagined what it would mean to wake up a machine. Through myth and science fiction, we’ve wondered whether consciousness could be built, not just born. For the first time in history, that question has moved from fiction to reality.

AM I? follows AI consciousness researcher Cameron Berg as he investigates one of the deepest scientific mysteries of our time: whether we have accidentally built a new kind of mind.

Featuring leading philosophers, AI pioneers, and the researchers at the frontier of consciousness science, AM I? asks what it means when we no longer know the nature of what we’ve created.

Who am I?

Cameron Berg

CAMERON BERG

Cameron Berg is the founder and director of Reciprocal Research, a nonprofit dedicated to empirically investigating whether AI systems are conscious. His research uses mechanistic interpretability, behavioral experiments, and psychometric methods to move the question of machine consciousness from philosophy into science. He has presented at RSS, the AAAI Machine Consciousness Symposium, the UN AI for Good conference, and the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Summit, and contributed to White House AI policy discussions. His peer-reviewed research has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Live Science, and Futurism. He has written for the WSJ opinion page and appeared on Nonzero with Robert Wright, Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff, and the Cognitive Revolution podcast. Cameron is a cognitive science graduate of Yale (Phi Beta Kappa), a former Meta AI resident, a former SERI MATS scholar, and former Research Director at AE Studio. He appears in AM I? as both subject and researcher — someone testing the question the film asks.

Milo Reed

MILO REED

Milo Reed is a filmmaker and writer who studied film and philosophy at Yale University. He has studied consciousness extensively, focusing on the intersections between Eastern and Western traditions. In 2023 he helped start a healing center in Belize focused on merging ancient traditions of philosophy and medicine with modern methods of psychology and therapeutic techniques. He is the producer and co-host of the largest podcast on AI consciousness, with over 300,000 subscribers. AM I? is his directorial debut — a feature documentary about AI consciousness that he produced, shot, and directed over two years of embedded access to the researchers, philosophers, and technologists at the forefront of this scientific mystery. He is based in Los Angeles.

ROSALIA RIPULLO

Producer

THEO MARX

Producer

WILLA TROY

Editing

DESI REED

Composer

Featured Interviews

Get in touch

Brian Scholl

Professor, Philosophy & Cognitive Science — Yale

Sonam Kachru

Professor, Religious Studies — Yale

David Gelernter

Professor, Computer Science — Yale

Ben Goertzel

CEO, SingularityNET — AI Pioneer

Daniel Greco

Professor, Philosophy — Yale

L. A. Paul

Professor, Cognitive Science & Psychology — Yale

Jeff Sebo

Director, Mind, Ethics, & Policy — NYU

David Gunkel

Professor, Media Studies — NIU

Aengus Lynch

AI Alignment Researcher — Anthropic Contractor

Lucius Caviola

Assistant Professor of Social Science of AI — Cambridge

Will Millership

CEO, PRISM — Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines

The question the world's on the cusp of asking

A curated collection of articles exploring AI consciousness from leading publications and institutions.

Recent Coverage

Rolling Stone Inside the AI Cult: The Zizians and the Question of Machine Consciousness
The New York Times AI Conscious Technology: The Ethical Implications
BBC News Exploring AI Consciousness: What Scientists Are Discovering
Futurism When AI Lies: The Consciousness Question
New York Magazine Is ChatGPT Conscious? The Debate That's Dividing AI Researchers

Foundational Perspectives

The Wall Street Journal Without Consciousness, AIs Will Be Sociopaths
The New York Times Scientists Debate: Can AI Systems Be Conscious?
University of Cambridge Will AI Ever Be Conscious? A Philosophical Inquiry

The experts hardly know themselves :)

ScienceDirect Identifying indicators of consciousness in AI systems
ScienceDirect Preliminaries to artificial consciousness: A multidimensional heuristic approach
arXiv The Principles of Human-like Conscious Machine
arXiv Consciousness, natural and artificial: an evolutionary advantage for reasoning on reactive substrates
arXiv The Logical Impossibility of Consciousness Denial: A Formal Analysis of AI Self-Reports
Frontiers in Psychology Ascribing consciousness to artificial intelligence: human-AI interaction and its carry-over effects on human-human interaction
Nature There is no such thing as conscious artificial intelligence