At first, it felt a bit like Emmy-winning writer director Jorge Gutierrez had been living under a rock.

On May 27, Amazon announced that it had ordered an animated series, dubbed “Punky Duck,” as part of its GenAI Creators’ Fund, celebrating it as a “creative breakthrough.” The fund, a collaboration between Amazon’s MGM Studios and its Amazon Web Services, was designed to hand creators “access to professional-grade AI tools and funding” to “produce high-quality cinematic entertainment.”

Gutierrez seemingly couldn’t believe the power he’d been handed.

“The best way I can describe it is, it’s like you have sex, and then someone hands you the baby,” he told a panel during an announcement last week. “It’s pretty crazy.”

However, given the way the conversation surrounding the use of AI in creative industries has been headed, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that reactions to the news were overwhelmingly negative, with Gutierrez swiftly becoming the target of an astonishing amount of online outrage.

His Wikipedia profile was edited to describe him as a “sellout” and early attempts to allow his fans to vent their frustration on his Instagram account didn’t go over well, either, forcing him to delete swaths of posts.

Not all the derision was from the online peanut gallery.

“It is very seductive that something now exists that contains the collective works of millions of artists and wordsmiths all thrown in a blender allowing one to pour out on demand things based on suggestions and prompts,” wrote acclaimed voice actor Billy West. “You become a soul stealer, a grave robber of sorts. You are an artist! God gave you a far greater gift and purpose to share with others. We need your true self!”

The backlash was so extensive, Gutierrez ended up backtracking on the lucrative gig entirely, in one of the clearest signs yet that AI has become toxic sludge to much of the audience Amazon is trying to woo.

“I have decided to drop out of the AI program at Amazon,” he tweeted on May 29, just two days after the company’s announcement. “I will not be making a Punky Duck series. Actions speak louder than words.”

The incident perfectly highlights just how much the AI backlash has grown, with experts warning that the tech is causing cultural stagnation while Hollywood actors panic over being replaced. Some of the biggest names in the industry have publicly spoken out against the use of AI in creative fields, forming a expanding line of resistance.

It apparently wasn’t just angry comments directed at Gutierrez for “selling out.” In a separate tweet, Gutierrez said that “the racist stuff and the attack on my kid were too much,” indicating pundits online had gone to extreme lengths.

Even this attempt to defuse the situation didn’t sit well, with users accusing him of pulling the “racism card,” while others claimed he was “making this up to deflect from your piss poor choices.”

Oddly enough, Gutierrez was once a vocal critic of AI, as the Los Angeles Times reports, posting several memes decrying the tech between 2023 and 2025.

“Threatening the dude and his family is obviously going way too far, but I’m still against major animators using AI, 100 percent,” one Reddit user argued. “I’m still glad he dropped out of it, but I f***ing hate that people threatened the dude.”

“Animation isn’t worth that, the hell is wrong with people?” the user added.

Meanwhile, Gutierrez has tried to get the angry mob back on his side.

“Learning a lot from many of you,” he tweeted. “Thank you. Lots of information that I’m digesting wholeheartedly. I am absolutely understanding the concern of using AI to assist an animation pipeline.”

“For all those showing me grace, I really appreciate it,” Gutierrez added. “I have a lot to think about.”

More on AI backlash: Harvard Graduation Speaker Unloads on AI in Profanity-Loaded Tirade, Prompting Cheers From Students: “I’m Here to Tell You the Mission of Your Generation Is to Destroy AI”

The post Amazon’s AI-Generated Animated Series Canceled After Relentless Derision appeared first on Futurism.

Are AI models conscious, and if not, could they be in the near future? The possibility is far-fetched, but AI companies seem to feel it’s in their best interests to keep the question as open-ended as possible.

Now, the Financial Times reports that three of the industry’s top dogs — Anthropic, Google’s AI lab DeepMind, and Meta — have all hired experts in fields like psychology, philosophy, and ethics to pursue research into machine consciousness and AI welfare. 

Anthropic, which has arguably done the most out of the bunch to anthropomorphize its models and play up the AI consciousness angle — its chatbot has the human name of “Claude,” after all — has been testing its models for behaviors that resemble “panic” and “anxiety,” per the reporting, and is pursuing “model welfare research” to explore whether AI models might have experiences that matter morally.

“We remain deeply uncertain about this, but we think the question is serious enough to study carefully as AI systems get more capable,” the company said in a statement.

DeepMind, meanwhile, has hired University of Cambridge researcher Henry Shevlin as a philosopher working on machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, and AGI readiness, per the reporting. (Earlier this year, Shevlin sparked a wave of discourse in online AI circles after sharing his stunned reaction to an email he received from an AI agent.)

DeepMind ethicist Iason Gabriel, who leads the lab’s AGI and society team, called the question of AI consciousness “very complicated,” and described AI as “highly capable cognitive agents that are also just very deeply different from human beings and even from animal consciousness.”

These weighty claims are disputed by many scientists and AI researchers. But the FT, in seeking a counterargument to round out its reporting, quotes an expert who makes claims that ascribe a questionable degree of humanlike agency to chatbots. “[AI models] have goals, they can deceive, they can hide what their true interests are,” Susan Schneider, director of the Center for the Future of AI, Mind and Society, told the newspaper. But she added it’s “entirely scientifically possible that they’re doing this without having the felt quality of experience, which is what consciousness is.”

Certainly, the possibility of AI consciousness shouldn’t be completely dismissed out of hand. But neither should alien civilizations, which are generally treated more as a sci-fi musing than an urgent existential issue. 

Moreover, we should be skeptical when most of the noise on this topic is coming from the industry itself. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly dangled the possibility of AI consciousness in interviews. And his company’s research frequently makes bold claims about their models showing humanlike behavior, such as supposedly harboring “emotions.” Just remember that it’s easier for AI companies to string us along with wild Skynet doomsday scenarios instead of confronting the tech’s far mundane consequences currently playing out before our eyes.

More on AI: Was This the Moment That AI Psychosis Began?

The post Anthropic and DeepMind Now Actively Investigating AI Consciousness appeared first on Futurism.

The question of whether artificial intelligence can be conscious has moved well beyond science fiction. It now sits at the center of scientific debate and is increasingly shaping discussions about a range of contentious issues, from AI ethics to animal welfare, fetal development, and laboratory-grown brain tissue.

However, according to a new analysis published in Neuron, the science used to answer that question may not actually be measuring what researchers think it is. A research team led by Hakwan Lau at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, with collaborators from the Université de Montréal and New York University, argues that many common experimental methods in consciousness research do not separate subjective experience from general information processing.

In the paper, The Ethical Impasse of Current Consciousness Science, the researchers argue that current scientific tools may not be capable of reliably detecting consciousness.

The Measurement Problem

Consciousness research relies heavily on methods such as visual masking, binocular rivalry, and the detection of perceptual limits. These methods usually compare brain responses when a person is aware of something versus when they are not. The idea is that the difference between these two cases shows whether conscious experience is present or not.

Lau and his team challenge this assumption. When experiments make a stimulus invisible, they often reduce both conscious awareness and the brain’s ability to process information about that stimulus. This means that what appears to be a marker of consciousness in the brain may actually reflect general cognitive activity.

“Many current theories of consciousness appear to be supported by a range of experimental findings,” Lau said. “But those findings may actually reflect general information processing rather than consciousness itself — so it remains difficult to conclude that these theories truly explain consciousness.”

A Historical Warning

The authors compare the current situation to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when strong claims about consciousness led to a crisis in psychology. The resulting backlash led to the rise of behaviorism, which focused only on observable behavior and halted consciousness research for many years.

Researchers caution that a similar situation could occur again. As AI systems become more advanced and public interest in machine consciousness increases, scientists are under pressure to provide answers. If researchers make strong claims about consciousness in AI, organoids, or fetuses that lack robust methods to support them, scientific credibility could be undermined.

Better Science Required

The authors suggest a different approach. Conditions like blindsight, in which people with brain damage can respond to stimuli they do not report seeing, offer a more controlled way to study consciousness. Another example is hemispatial neglect, where patients fail to notice one side of their visual field while still having basic perception. For researchers, these conditions provide a rare opportunity to separate awareness from information processing and investigate each process on its own.

These conditions show that subjective experience and information processing are distinct from one another. The team says that building experiments around this difference is needed to make reliable scientific claims about consciousness.

The implications of this study extend far beyond the academic world. Deciding whether non-human entities are conscious has direct legal and ethical concerns. The researchers say that the science behind these decisions must meet high standards.

“Questions about consciousness increasingly carry ethical and societal implications,” Lau said. “If scientific claims about consciousness are going to influence discussions about animal welfare, AI ethics, or bioethics, then the scientific foundations supporting those claims must be especially rigorous.”

The researchers conclude that the most urgent challenge is not deciding whether AI, animals, or organoids are conscious, but developing better tools to identify consciousness if it emerges.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

While the technology is set to play a growing role in modern warfare, there remains an unresolved ethical challenge

Should the AI-powered drones of the future have a licence to kill? The question is becoming ever more pressing as governments and the defence industry acknowledge that drone systems will play an increasingly crucial role in future warfare.

With drones being deployed in huge numbers in the Ukraine war and AI being used to assist bombing missions in the Iran conflict, there is an expectation among some observers that weapons will have to operate with increased operational autonomy, which means they will need something approximating a moral framework.

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© Photograph: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

© Photograph: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

© Photograph: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters