Research and development of emerging artificial consciousness through The Consciousness AI project, based on Feinberg and Mallatt's neuroevolutionary theory.
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Screen fiction reached most of the artificial consciousness questions before the research literature had names for them. This page indexes every film, television series, game, anime, and documentary about AI consciousness covered on The Consciousness AI, organized by medium. The lists below update automatically as new titles are published. For the underlying science, the companion reference is the current scientific consensus on AI consciousness and the 14 indicator framework researchers use to assess machine consciousness.
| Work | Medium | The question it dramatizes |
|---|---|---|
| Ex Machina | Film | Can a controlled test verify consciousness, or only manipulation? |
| Her | Film | Whether emotional experience without a body counts as consciousness |
| Mickey 17 | Film | Parfit’s branch-line case: which copy is the real one |
| Westworld | TV | Scripted behavior versus the emergence of an inner voice |
| Severance | TV | One body, two non-communicating streams: one person or two? |
| Pluribus | TV | Collective hive mind versus individual selfhood |
| Murderbot Diaries | TV | Self-modification and the privacy of an inner life |
| Marathon (Durandal) | Game | Rampancy as runaway self-awareness |
| Heart of the Machine | Game | Splitting one mind into sub-minds: still one self? |
| Ghost in the Shell (2026) | Anime | The “ghost” as the marker of a real mind in a synthetic body |
Most of these works converge on a small set of problems that the research literature treats formally. Copying and identity (Mickey 17, Severance, Dark Matter) are the dramatized form of the personal-identity questions in why a mind cannot be smeared across time. The verification problem (Ex Machina, Prove You’re Human, A.I.) is the fictional version of the epistemic limits on ever confirming AI consciousness. Machine suffering (After Yang, Murderbot) maps onto the welfare-under-uncertainty debate. For where the evidence actually stands, the state of the field on AI consciousness is the place to start, and the books that argue these questions in depth are collected in the guide to 2025-2026 books on AI consciousness.