alt Hacker NewsArguably LLMs are showing that self awareness or self reference is a property that comes "for free" or as a corollary of more generic requirements. It used to be that self/consciousness would be a very mysterious and difficult thing to achieve but the point is that in practice they didn't even have to try, it just came as a byproduct of learning from the input data (corpus of human examples), and also the ability to talk about arbitrary things and thus itself.
Replies
chrisjj • yesterday at 10:13 PM
In which case the computer can save a lot of bother and use printf("I'm self-aware"); Job done.
They very clearly are not self aware. I regularly see them responding to their own statements as you/your (i.e. not having been generated by themselves). They do generally generate language in a manner consistent with the self awareness that we have and encode in our language, but that's the limit of it. Its the appearance of self awareness not actual self awareness.