By injecting “thoughts” directly into large language models, researchers are trying to map out AI’s capacity for introspection.

W hat’s on your mind right now? You can probably answer this question without thinking too hard about it. Being aware of our own thought processes — a capacity called introspection — seems to come naturally to us.

Yet among philosophers and psychologists, introspection is a subject of active debate. Some think it’s closely related to consciousness . Others argue that it’s an elaborate illusion . It’s tricky to test theories of introspection in the lab — or to pin down a precise definition in the first place.

Now, after over a century of studying introspection in humans and animals, researchers are beginning to explore the phenomenon in unlikely new subjects — large language models. These systems, which are based on mathematical structures called neural networks, excel at cognitive tasks that until recently seemed exclusive to humans.…