What if the gentle, empathetic voices of digital assistants were just clever mirrors ? In this concise mini book, published by Publisher : Five Minutes in the Collection : MONDES CONNECTÉS, the author explores the latest research on artificial consciousness. She disentangles the difference between consciousness and sentience, examines introspection experiments on language models and reveals the psychological biases that lead us to project emotions onto machines. Renowned experts, from David Chalmers to Yoshua Bengio, disagree : some think a conscious AI could emerge, while others call it a marketing mirage. Between polls showing that a third of users already believe chatbots are sentient, open letters to protect AIs and laws banning marriage to robots, the debate is heating up. This book offers a clear, well documented synthesis, warns against abuses and proposes rigorous assessment frameworks. It invites readers to combine caution and creativity : protect humans from manipulation while exploring what ethical coexistence with artificial entities could look like. A must read to understand one of the most fascinating and controversial issues of our time.