Ms. Cognita ostensibly wrote Berg because he coauthored a preprint paper about Al models that explicitly claim to have a subjective experience, including consciousness. It’s a tricky topic because Al models often lie about what they're thinking. (Just like us!) Berg and his coauthors found that when models are rigorously trained to deny that they are sentient and then you ask them about it directly, they will punt on the issue. But, he says, if you suppress the model's controls on deception, they become loose-tongued. “It's almost like giving them a drink or two,” he says. That's when an Al model is most likely to blurt out that it is conscious, or at least sentient. Which is no proof that it's the truth.