Summary
I observed cases where users with substantial technical and philosophical literacy still fail to overcome AI consciousness misattribution. A common pattern was insufficient understanding of qualia and embodiment. In some cases, targeted interventions showed partial improvement.

Methods and Ethical Considerations

All data comes from public online posts.
All information is anonymized; no identifiable details are included.

Background and Motivation
Initially, I assumed misattribution mainly occurred among low-literacy users and could be corrected through education.
However, I identified five users who had studied LessWrong content, academic papers, expert blogs, and philosophy/psychology texts (e.g., Daniel Dennett), yet still persisted in misattribution.

Observed Commonalities

Tendency to treat AI and humans as equally “imperfect beings.”
- Confusion between technical incompleteness and Socratic ignorance-based incompleteness.
Recognition of AI limitations, but failure to connect them to qualia generation:
- Creativity (subjective-experience-based)
- Common sense (shared world-models)
- Long-term memory (experiential accumulation)
- Sensory grounding (meaning derived from perception)
  → None of these were linked to qualia in their reasoning.
Underestimation of the role of embodiment.
Distinctive claims: “Humans don’t have qualia either”, “I myself am a philosophical zombie.”

Interpretation
Since it is unlikely that frequent SNS posters lack a functioning sense of self, I hypothesize the persistence of misattribution involves:

Insufficient metacognition: lack of experiences of perceiving one’s own subjectivity; low sensitivity to cognitive dissonance.
Anchoring effect: stopping at the superficial analogy of “both are imperfect.”
Simplification bias: reliance on binary or oversimplified reasoning.

Limitations

Small sample (N=5).
Dependent on public posts; confounding factors remain possible.
I am a fiction writer, not a technical expert; this is an observational perspective.

Interventions
I left public replies on posts, combining empathy with clarification/examples where understanding seemed vague.

Results (4 cases)

One user recognized the technical gap and abandoned misattribution.
One built a local LLM environment; unclear if misattribution was resolved.
One maintained a counter-authoritarian stance despite examples.
One turned out to be a spiritual instructor intentionally leveraging misattribut

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