Altered neural processing of evaluative feedback from presumed conscious AI.

Interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly prominent in everyday life. Modern AI can produce intelligent, witty, and even sarcastic responses, leading people to assume AI is conscious. This raises the question whether AI is perceived as conscious, and how people respond to such machines behaviorally and neurally. This preregistered electroencephalogram (EEG) study investigated the processing of social evaluative feedback from a human and two putative AI algorithms differing in attributed consciousness. Participants (N = 40) received feedback, supposedly sent by either another human, a conventional AI based on a large language model (ChatGPT), or an innovative AI capable of conscious processing (AICA-2). Human received the highest conscious ratings, while AICA-2 was rated significantly higher than ChatGPT. Event-related potentials showed enlarged early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential responses to human vs. AI feedback. Exploratory analyses revealed differences between AICA-2 and ChatGPT, whereas the EPN effect correlated with attributed consciousness.