03.09.2026journal-article
Frontiers in Psychology
AI models as consciousness attributors: how LLMs ascribe consciousness to other agents
Research on AI consciousness has largely focused on whether AI systems are conscious and how humans attribute consciousness to them. Yet large language models (LLMs) increasingly function as consciousness attributors, generating judgments about whether and to what degree other entities are conscious. We introduce model-generated consciousness attribution as an object of empirical operationalization and diagnosis, defining an attribution rule as the recurring relationship between features of a target and an evaluato …