Animal and AI consciousness: Experts uncover eerie behaviours we can no longer ignore

That quiet moment when your pet pauses and looks at you as if it can feel your mood, or that late-night chat with an AI system that seems a little too aware, often leaves us wondering whether these interactions are purely mechanical or signs of something deeper. Both animals and AI systems display behaviours that blur the familiar boundaries between instinct, intelligence and awareness, raising important questions about what consciousness really means and who might possess it. A highly relevant peer-reviewed study published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by Birch, Schnell and Clayton (2020) proposed a five-dimension framework for animal consciousness, suggesting that species experience the world through varying layers of perception, emotional evaluation, unity of experience, temporal