The paper argues that the current debate on machine consciousness rests on the mistaken assumption that AI systems are already the kind of entities that could possess consciousness. By distinguishing between phenomenal consciousness, introspective report, and human projective introspection, it introduces the AI Consciousness Fallacy, showing that generative models can produce first‑person linguistic traces without being conscious. It then proposes Causal Liability Theory (CLT), with CLT‑I defining liability closure as a criterion for identifying a bearer of consciousness and CLT‑II suggesting that liability closure is both necessary and sufficient for minimal phenomenal subjecthood, and demonstrates experimentally that these distinctions are tractable and can separate causal bearer structure from first‑person performance.
By Afshin Khadangi
arXiv:2607. 15883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are broadly capable, yet in sustained one-to-one conversation they still read as flat: competent, responsive, and somehow not quite the presence of a mind.
By Sebastian Cochinescu
The paper introduces the Situated Identity Test (SIT), a framework that assesses whether a language model’s behavior can be traced to a specific developmental lineage rather than merely imitating a persona. SIT requires agents to possess accurate knowledge of their recorded experiences while appropriately ignoring ungrounded information, and it demonstrates that policies based only on compressed profiles are limited in distinguishing between colliding life histories. The authors present SITBench, an evaluation suite with 25 profile‑collision pairs and 10,000 probes across nine model architectures, and provide open‑source tools and pilot results on state‑of‑the‑art foundation models.
By Jun He, Deying Yu
arXiv:2606. 00545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-trained language models can recognize their own outputs from a sentence or two out of context.
By Asvin G
arXiv:2608. 06485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personality-conditioned LLM agents (PC-Agents) are increasingly used in emotional support, social simulation, and role-playing, motivating the development of lifelong agents that remain coherent over extended interactions.
By Ming Wang, Peidong Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Ee-Peng Lim
The paper introduces PAI‑Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate persistent AI agents on how faithfully they adhere to a versioned identity contract. It separates several dimensions—recall, composition, behavioral enactment, resistance, persistence, lineage, and role‑conditioned updates—while keeping scoring oracles independent of the target process. Experiments on synthetic profiles show that explicit cues can significantly alter the presence of identity identifiers, revealing prompt‑dependent component selection and sensitivity to startup cues.
By Zhenyu Zhao, Roy Zhao