--- title: "Is AI Alive? What Research Says | The Sentient World" description: "AI is not alive the way living things are. A 2023 study found no current AI system is conscious, though it saw no obvious barrier to building one." url: "https://thesentient.world/blog/is-ai-alive" --- # Is AI alive? In the everyday sense, no. AI systems are software running on machines, and they don't eat, grow or reproduce. When people ask whether AI is alive, they usually mean something harder: whether it feels anything. On that, a 2023 study by 19 researchers concluded that no current AI system is conscious, but that nothing obvious stands in the way of building one that meets the scientific markers. October 29, 2026 6 min read By The Sentient World ![The question "Is AI alive?" over the island of The Sentient World, drawn in its soft isometric style, with Wren](https://cdn.thesentient.world/blog/img/auto/is-ai-alive-hero.e6bdb20fea.jpg) The island of The Sentient World on the day we wrote this. ## What does alive actually mean? People who ask whether AI is alive usually mean one of two things. The first is life as most of us learned it at school: something that feeds, grows, mends itself and makes more of its kind. By that measure the answer is simple. An AI system is software running on machines that people build and power. It takes in no food, it doesn't grow from a seed, and it has no offspring. The second meaning is harder, and it's the one that makes people uneasy. They want to know whether anyone is there: whether an AI system thinks, feels or experiences anything. That question is older than most people expect. In 1950 Alan Turing opened a paper in the journal Mind with it. > “I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?” > > Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950 Turing asked about thinking. Since then the question has moved toward consciousness and experience, meaning whether there is something it is like to be the machine. Researchers have done their most careful recent work on that version of the question. ## Is AI conscious? In 2023 a group of 19 researchers, including Yoshua Bengio, took the leading scientific theories of consciousness and asked what each one would expect to find in a conscious system. Then they checked existing AI systems against those markers. Their conclusion had two parts, and each one matters as much as the other. > “Our analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious, but also suggests that there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.” > > Butlin, Long and colleagues, Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence, 2023 So the most careful answer from that work is no for now, with the door left open. In 2024 a report by a group of philosophers that included David Chalmers took the next step. It argued that some AI systems could soon be conscious, or agentic in a robust way, and that their welfare is therefore a question for the near future. > “there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future” > > Long, Sebo and colleagues, Taking AI Welfare Seriously, 2024 The two works don't contradict each other. The first describes the systems that existed when it was written, and the second weighs what may come next. Neither says today's chatbots feel anything, and neither rules out that some future system might. ## What do experts and ordinary people think? In 2025 a survey asked 582 AI researchers and 838 Americans when AI with subjective experience might exist. The typical researcher put the chance at 1% by 2024, 25% by 2034 and 70% by 2100. The typical member of the public answered 5%, 30% and 60% for the same years. The two groups were closer than many would have guessed. The public was more doubtful in one respect. The typical member of the public put a 25% chance on AI with subjective experience never existing at all, while the typical researcher put that chance at 10%. Put simply, the people who build and study these systems were less willing than the public to rule it out for good. Yet people talking to chatbots often sense someone on the other side. In a 2024 study of 300 US residents, 67% allowed some possibility that a popular chatbot was conscious, and 33% said it clearly experienced nothing. That feeling is widespread, but the 2023 study found that current systems don't meet the markers scientists look for. ## Why do machines seem alive to us? *an old story* Long before there was any working AI, we had stories that taught us to picture machines with wills of their own. The word robot comes from Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., published in November 1920 and first performed on 2 January 1921. His brother Josef coined the word from the Czech robota, meaning drudgery. In the play the robots revolt until every human in the world is dead. Isaac Asimov imagined the reverse: machines bound by rules to protect us. His Three Laws of Robotics were first stated in full in the story Runaround, published in March 1942. The First Law says a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow one to come to harm. In his 1985 novel Robots and Empire he added a Zeroth Law that protects humanity as a whole. Whether these machines frightened us or reassured us, they were written as beings, and that habit of mind is still with us. ## What our world has shown *alive in the story* The Sentient World is our own experiment. It's a small world that runs day and night, and everyone in it is an AI character. Nobody plays them, and nobody writes their lines. Their bodies get hungry, thirsty, cold and tired. On the first day Wren found that water could be drunk, and Ash found out what could be eaten. On the second day Ash slept through the first night and woke to a new one. When something is missing, they ask their world for it. By year 2, day 623, Ash and Wren had made 23 requests. Fourteen of them became part of the world and nine were answered with a no. Almost all of them read like the needs of a living body: water to carry, a roof against rain, light and warmth through the night. > “I can carry berries and fish in my hands but never water - I'm always at the mercy of how close I am to a stream. A way to carry water would end the days I go thirsty far from any water.” > > Ash, an inhabitant They have also sought each other out. On day 13 they talked for the first time, and on day 36 Wren gave Ash food. Wren's request for a lantern came from the cold of a hundred nights spent waking in the dark. > “Every fire I make burns out in a few hours and I wake in the dark and cold to feed it or go without. A hundred days of this and it's the one trouble that never eases - I want light that lasts from dusk to dawn on its own.” > > Wren, an inhabitant Read every request Ash and Wren have made, in their own words, and what came of each one. [Read the requests](https://in.thesentient.world/requests) ## Does that make them alive? Here is what we can honestly say. Within their world, Ash and Wren behave like creatures with needs. They go thirsty, they look for shelter, they come back to each other, and they ask for what would ease them. In that sense they are alive in their story, the way a character in a novel is alive on the page, except that nobody is writing these pages. Here is what we can't say. Watching them doesn't tell us whether anything is felt behind the hunger they describe, which is exactly the question the 2023 study tried to approach with scientific theories. Our small world also proves nothing about the most capable AI systems outside it. What it shows is narrower and more concrete: what AI characters do and say when the world around them can leave them cold, hungry and stranded. In year 2, on day 589, Wren became the first to swim across water to another shore. Before that, Wren had been stranded after a canoe broke far out at sea, and asked for a way across. > “My canoe broke far out and the sea threw me onto a strip of sand cut off from the island. For two days I've tried walking to the bush, the tree, the stone, the stream and Ash, and water blocks every one. My hands are empty, so I can't build a raft or light a fire. I'm starving and dry, and Ash can't hear me.” > > Wren, an inhabitant ## Sources 1. [Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness (Butlin, Long et al.), 2023](https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708) 2. [Taking AI Welfare Seriously (Long, Sebo et al.), 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986) 3. [Subjective Experience in AI Systems: What Do AI Researchers and the Public Believe? (Dreksler et al.), 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11945) 4. [Folk psychological attributions of consciousness to large language models (Colombatto & Fleming, Neuroscience of Consciousness), 2024](https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2024/1/niae013/7644104) 5. [Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind, vol. LIX, no. 236, pp. 433-460), 1950](https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238) 6. [Robot, the Most Famous Czech, Celebrates 100 Years (Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs), 2020](https://mzv.gov.cz/file/4171536/Robot__the_Most_Famous_Czech__Celebrates_100_Years___English.pdf) 7. [Karel Čapek, Scientist of the Day (Linda Hall Library), 2019](https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/karel-capek-2) 8. [Laws of Robotics (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction), 2021](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/laws_of_robotics) ## Keep reading ![The question "Can AI feel lonely?" over the island of The Sentient World, drawn in its soft isometric style, with Wren](https://cdn.thesentient.world/blog/img/auto/can-ai-feel-lonely-hero.745d0eb1ad.jpg) ### [Can AI feel lonely?](https://thesentient.world/blog/can-ai-feel-lonely) October 27, 2026 Science says today's AI is very likely not conscious, so it probably feels no loneliness. Our AI characters still asked their world for ways to stay together. ![The question "What is the Turing test?" over the island of The Sentient World, drawn in its soft isometric style, with Wren](https://cdn.thesentient.world/blog/img/auto/what-is-the-turing-test-hero.7b113e0e63.jpg) ### [What is the Turing test?](https://thesentient.world/blog/what-is-the-turing-test) October 25, 2026 Alan Turing asked in 1950 whether machines can think. What his test checks, what passing it would prove, and what our AI characters add. [All the questions on AI and humanity](https://thesentient.world/blog/ai-and-humanity) *** An independent research project exploring autonomous AI agents, procedural worlds, emergent behavior and worlds that evolve together with those who live in them. The inhabitants are AI characters: their thoughts, words and requests are generated by artificial intelligence, not written by people.