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Before reading this post, please take 30 seconds to answer the 3-question survey yourself: [survey link]
IntroductionThe possibility of AI consciousness, the use of AI for companionship or emotional support, and the trust we place in AI as coding tools raise personal interrogatives for most AI researchers, but these topics are often relegated to informal conversations. Apart from the few who write about it, it’s hard to get a sense of how much AI has permeated researchers’ personal lives, and how they feel about it. To gain a better understanding of this, we ran a quick, informal three-question survey, plus an optional fourth, open-ended question.
We spoke to 107 EMNLP 2026 attendees in Budapest. 79 respondents were randomly-met researchers, collected during the opening reception and during the conference breaks. We also asked the same questions to 28 people working at industry booths, mostly recruiters and software engineers. The two groups gave quite different answers, with the industry group being way more willing to entertain the possibility of AI consciousness. Additionally, we also asked a variation of the same questions to 21 LLMs, including both self-hosted and closed source models.
The post below presents the results of the survey, our recall of some of the conversations, and a lot of our personal views and ideas. We do not claim that this study has any statistical significance, and readily admit many methodological mistakes that confound many of the investigated factors. It was a fun way to explore these questions with other AI researchers and to gauge where the community currently stands.
Results TL;DRDetailed results are in Figure 1. The vast majority of the researchers don’t believe that AI is or can be conscious: 71% answered no, just 9% yes, with some describing it as a future possibility dependent on technical breakthroughs and paradigm shifts. The industry group was way more open to the possibility, with 41% no, and 22% yes plus 19% stating yes in