This deception is by design: These AI systems are engineered to game us. Prediction even underpins the illusion that our AI companion is a mind in our pocket, feeding into our biased view of what consciousness looks like. Plants are routinely overlooked in traditional cognitive sciences, lacking the neurons that are taken as prerequisites for a mind. Like the inscrutable activities of a plant, an artificial mind would not necessarily have an interface that we could understand. Now, Calvo and the MINT lab’s new project, “Behavioral Evidence for Plant Consciousness,” aims to revisit the question with more rigorous, plant-centered methods.