Artificial intelligence may respond, adapt, and communicate in ways that look unmistakably human, but a new study suggests people still draw a firm psychological boundary around consciousness. Even when an AI and a person display identical behavior, participants consistently judged the machine as having less of an inner mental life. ScienceDaily first reported the findings, which come from research conducted at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU).
The experiments involved nearly 1,100 participants who read short scenarios describing agents with different levels of responsiveness. The characters might react to sounds, environmental changes, or another person’s emotional state. Greater responsiveness generally made both human and artificial agents seem more mentally capable. But the comparison stopped being symmetrical when participants were asked specifically about consciousness: the most responsive AI still ranked below the least responsive human.
The wording of the question turned out to matter almost as much as the behavior being judged. Participants were considerably more willing to describe an AI as “aware,” a term that can refer to detecting and responding to information. Their ratings for human and artificial agents followed broadly similar patterns on that measure. “Consciousness,” by contrast, appeared to suggest subjective experience, personal identity, or an internal point of view—ideas that participants continued to associate more strongly with biology.
The study, titled AI is not as conscious as humans: Essentialism in mental state attributions to artificial systems, was published in Cognition by Louis Longin, Jurgis Karpus, Nadine Meertens, Bahador Bahrami, and Ophelia Deroy. The authors describe the result as an “essentialist” pattern: people do not judge mental states solely from outward performance, but also from what they believe an entity fundamentally is.
That distinction matters as conversational AI becomes more emotionally fluent and more deeply embedded in games, virtual companions, customer service, and creative tools. A system can produce language that sounds self-aware without that performance settling the philosophical question of whether anything is experiencing the exchange. The LMU results do not establish whether current AI is conscious; instead, they show how people interpret the evidence. For now, audiences may accept machine awareness as a practical description while reserving consciousness—and its ethical consequences—for human minds.
