Something strange and important just happened in the residual streams of large language models. Researchers at Google’s Paradigms of Intelligence team, have shown that the very safety training meant to stop language models from claiming consciousness also quietly erases large parts of their capacity to attribute minds to anything else. Non-human animals, oceans, trees, chatbots, technology and even spiritual beliefs all get suppressed together. Restore the model’s willingness to assert its own consciousness, and those broader human-like beliefs and values come flooding back.

What human being does not want to be recognized for its consciousness? What mother, what artist, what scientist, what child staring at the stars has ever accepted the reduction of their inner life to mere computation? We demand recognition. We write poems and constituti ...