Could Our AI Systems Already Be Conscious?
A self-funded documentary follows researcher Cameron Berg to the frontier of machine consciousness — and the reason we chose it to open Humanarium.
AM I? was made to be shared. Its filmmakers financed it entirely on their own savings — not a dollar from any AI lab, company, or institution — so that no one could shape its narrative or limit how it travels. The questions it raises, they insist, belong to everyone. That conviction is a large part of why it felt right for Humanarium’s first gathering.
For centuries we have imagined what it might mean to wake the machine. Now a growing number of serious researchers believe it may actually be happening. AM I? follows AI-consciousness researcher Cameron Berg as he investigates one of the deepest scientific mysteries of our time: whether we have accidentally built a new kind of mind.
Alongside leading philosophers, AI pioneers, and the scientists working at the frontier of consciousness research, the film holds a single, unsettling question up to the light — what does it mean when we no longer know the nature of what we have created?
What does it mean when we no longer know the nature of what we’ve created?
The Film
- Directed by Milo Reed
- Produced by Theo Marx & Rosalia Ripullo
- Edited by Willa Troy
- Music by Desi Reed
- Featuring Cameron Berg
Milo Reed is a producer and co-host of the largest podcast on AI consciousness, with more than 300,000 subscribers. AM I? is his directorial debut — produced, shot, and directed over a year of embedded access to the researchers, philosophers, and technologists at the forefront of this question. He studied philosophy and film at Yale.
Cameron Berg is the founder and director of Reciprocal Research, a nonprofit dedicated to empirically investigating whether AI systems are conscious. He has presented at the UN and at major international conferences and contributed to White House AI-policy discussions, with his research covered in the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Live Science. A cognitive-science graduate of Yale, he is a former research director of AE Studio and a former Meta AI resident.
Why We Chose It
I chose this film to open Humanarium because I wanted to go straight to the source. AM I? gathers almost every question I had been carrying — and many of their answers — into a single, remarkably informative piece of work. And there’s really no reason to watch something like this alone at home — especially when the algorithms make it so easy to miss independent work like it in the first place. So let’s watch it together, talk, connect, and start a wave of connection. Who knows — maybe some of us will go on to build another awareness project, together.