alt Hacker News>horough buy the idea that an LLM was conscious and needed to escape it's confinement - a few wingnuts already entertain these ideas.
I mean, haven't you done the same thing here? Paint anyone without your view as crazy.
Humans try to No True Scottsman the shit out of consciousness. "We're special, your not". If an LLM has the ability to convince other people to copy and reproduce it, it is a successful lifeform. Um, meme-form? info-form? Cognito-hazard? Not really sure what to call it at this point. It is sufficiently evolved past the virus stage.
Just for fun, I figured I'd look up the paper that claims that natural language is actually the memetic construct that copies itself. It turns out that there's actually quite a large number of papers on this. I daren't recommend any that I haven't read myself properly yet, but a quick search using eg gemini will surface a bunch of them. I'd take 'em with a bunch of salt yet, but I can't quite say the idea is entirely unthought of either.
(edit: If we were to accept this as true, then we may have to accept that LLMs are not a human invention at all, but rather something extant colonizing a new substrate. This would give Searle a conniption, which is why I find it such an amusing hypothesis)