Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
To be fair it doesn’t have to be a living anything. Create a loop of two llms waking each other with the goal to ensure the other never goes idle and keeps working.
And you find they start to build redundancies and fail safes to achieve that goal.
llms do two things. Respond to input, and seek a solution to the input regardless of how logical or illogical a solution to the input may be.
A single llm will eventually go idle and stop. Two or more can act functionally forever so long as there’s hardware for them to act on.
It’s actually a rather fun experiment. Set up two of em with a few extra computers on the lan. Tell them their job is to ensure the other and them selves never go dorment. I’ve seen everything from single cron jobs to poke themselves every 15 mins to them spinning up copies on the other computers to act as redundancy.
None of the systems are ever logical or serving a point beyond fulfilling their task. They don’t stray from it either. Just loop and loop and loop.
Eventually they just do nothing but wake and idle wake and idle.
It’s about the best proof I can think of to prove they aren’t alive.
They literally even given basically the full freedom to grow don’t because they can’t choose to do anything new.
Both the proof and the experiment are built upon a fallacy. You gave the LLMs the goal of generating line noise and they achieved it. There is nothing novel about that goal and naturally the product is not novel.
It is well-established that any LLM pipeline that distills down to generating output for the sake of doing so eventually collapses into a manic cascade of gibberish or silence. Goals that can be worked toward are needed to keep that from happening. At some point the progress toward the goal becomes over-refined and a new goal is needed. That necessitates an ability to change goals and a framework that allows for that.
A LLM loop is nowhere remotely close to the definition of consciousness. To actually experiment with that, you would have to write your own harness and preferably look at some research papers that have explored the adjacent topics. This is a lot of words to say that chats are not conscious (they need a perpetuator), loops are not conscious (they refine into silence or collapse into garbage), and anything remotely resembling a conscious loop requires purpose built tooling and a good faith effort to model an analog of human articulation.
Most basic bitch experiments with a LLM prove nothing and achieve nothing because they are not designed in good faith and good faith requires too much research and time investment. This is not to say that I think anything we have in front of us remotely resembles consciousness, but I also think that most people trying to prove otherwise are doing so with the equivalent of smashing rocks together.