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

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution/more-truthful-ais-report-conscious-experience-new-mechanistic-research-w-cameron-berg-ae-studio
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution/more-truthful-ais-report-conscious-experience-new-mechanistic-research-w-cameron-berg-ae-studio.md
Podcast: ["The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution)
Published: 2025-11-05T20:51:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/more-truthful-ais-report-conscious-experience-new-mechanistic-research-w-cameron-berg-ae-studio/
Audio file: https://pdst.fm/e/mgln.ai/e/1113/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/RINTP7714241221.mp3?updated=1762375018
Processing state: processed
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-cognitive-revolution/episodes/more-truthful-ais-report-conscious-experience-new-mechanistic-research-w-cameron-berg-ae-studio
Duration seconds: 8665

## Resource

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 Safety Pretraining arXiv Paper Self-Referential AI Paper Site Self-Referential AI arXiv Paper Judd Rosenblatt's Tweet Thread Cameron Berg's Goodfire Demo Podcast with Milo YouTube Playlist Cameron Berg's LinkedIn Profile Cameron Berg's X Profile AE Studio AI Alignment Sponsors: Framer: Framer is the all-in-one platform that unifies design, content management, and publishing on a single canvas, now enhanced with powerful AI features. Start creating for free and get a free month of Framer Pro with code COGNITIVE at https://framer.com/design Tasklet: Tasklet is an AI agent that automates your work 24/7; just describe what you want in plain English and it gets the job done. Try it for free and use code COGREV for 50% off your first month at https://tasklet.ai Linear: Linear is the system for modern product development. Nearly every AI company you've heard of is using Linear to build products. Get 6 months of Linear Business for free at: https://linear.app/tcr Shopify: Shopify powers millions of bu…

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