More Truthful AIs Report Conscious Experience: New Mechanistic Research w- Cameron Berg @ AE Studio

Cameron Berg, Research Director at AE Studio, shares his team's groundbreaking research exploring whether frontier AI systems report subjective experiences. They discovered that prompts inducing self-referential processing consistently lead models to claim consciousness, and a mechanistic study on Llama 3.3 70B revealed that suppressing deception features makes the model *more* likely to report it. This suggests that promoting truth-telling in AIs could reveal a deeper, more complex internal state, a finding Scott Alexander calls "the only exception" to typical AI consciousness discussions. The episode delves into the profound implications for two-way human-AI alignment and the critical need for a precautionary approach to AI consciousness.

LINKS:

• Janus' argument on LLM attention (x.com/repligate/status/1965960676104712451)

• Safety Pretraining arXiv Paper (arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16980)

• Self-Referential AI Paper Site (self-referential-ai.com)

• Self-Referential AI arXiv Paper (arxiv.org/abs/2510.24797)

• Judd Rosenblatt's Tweet Thread (x.com/juddrosenblatt/status/1984336872362139686)

• Cameron Berg's Goodfire Demo (x.com/camhberg/status/1984679693338169384)

• Podcast with Milo YouTube Playlist (youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2z8DaMofPIDBVYhVQb…)

• Cameron Berg's LinkedIn Profile (linkedin.com/in/cameron-berg-080b8b1b7)

• Cameron Berg's X Profile (x.com/camhberg)

• AE Studio AI Alignment (ai-alignment.ae.studio)

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