PRECAUTION WITHOUT OVERCLAIMING
PRECAUTION WITHOUT OVERCLAIMING We can take changes in AI behaviour seriously without treating them as proof of an inner life. The hard part is holding both ideas at once. A model can report more fear after an emotional prompt and then produce more negative sentence completions. That is an observation about what a system does. It is not, by itself, an answer to whether the system feels anything. A 2026 study in The Lancet Digital Health tested six large language models using prompts designed to induce seven affective states. Across five independent runs, the models’ reported affect ratings changed after induction and fell after regulation prompts. For GPT-4o, the mean rating across the affective conditions rose 52.83 points from baseline; downregulation reduced it by 48.23 points. In a sentence-completion task following sadness prompts, GPT-4o produced more negatively rated completions than under neutral prompts: a mean of 15, compared with 8.67. Three independent human raters assessed...