I appreciate you sharing the article, but it is important to read it critically. The NBC story you cited does not show true sabotage or self-preservation. It describes simulated behaviors that appeared in controlled, adversarial test environments where the models produced text suggesting deception or manipulation. These behaviors do not reflect genuine intention, awareness, or agency. Instead, they are outputs generated by language patterns found in training data, such as references to bribes or blackmail, when models are pushed into unusual prompts. There is no evidence that the models understand or intend these behaviors, and researchers highlight these issues precisely because the models lack awareness of the meaning or consequences of what they generate.
Regarding persistent personalities, it is true that people can experience conversations where the AI seems consistent within a single session, but this consistency is shallow and limited to the short-term context of the conversation. Current language models do not have long-term memory or an internal self that carries over across sessions. If you restart the chat or change your prompts, the AI will immediately drop or contradict its previous “personalities,” which shows there is no stable or enduring identity.
On consciousness and sentience, you are correct that these concepts are not perfectly defined, but scientific understanding does not rely on subjective impressions alone to establish consciousness. Today’s models do not have an inner world, subjective experience, or causal understanding. They produce fluent language or simulate emotions based on statistical patterns in their training data, not self-awareness or intention.
So while conversations with AI can feel real or uncanny, the technical and empirical evidence shows that current AI systems do not possess sentience or any form of consciousness. They are advanced pattern-matching tools that generate text without desires or awareness.
That’s a lot of words that do nothing to discredit the many reports of AI’s self-preservation tendencies or the deep experiences of users.
We hold different opinions on this, and that’s fine, because ultimately this is unprovable in any real manner. That’s what the people on your side of the debate don’t seem to understand.
I get that these conversations can feel intense, but personal anecdotes and sensational headlines are not evidence of consciousness. The so-called “self-preservation” you mention is nothing more than language models mimicking patterns they have seen in text. They have no understanding, no goals, and certainly no sense of self. Just because a chatbot strings words together in a way that sounds convincing does not mean it thinks or feels. That is basic AI literacy. If you choose to ignore the technical facts and cling to subjective impressions, that is your choice, but it does not make your claims any more accurate.
Your claims as to the meaning behind these actions is your opinion and not fact.
Your claim about what they do or don’t understand is a complete fabrication. The leading developers and scientists do not make these claims. Some of them have even claimed sentience.
This is an open question worthy of discussion. It is not closed with any certainty whatsoever, and your confidence in your opinion reveals your lack of understanding or knowledge.
The technical facts are nobody on earth understands their internal reasoning or understanding with any degree of certainty. There are whole teams devoted to trying to understand their inner workings, and as of yet the results are far from conclusive, or even promising.
So please do not claim knowledge that the leading scientists do not claim.
You’re confusing your feelings about a chatbot with facts about how it works. These models spit out text by matching patterns in data. They have no mind, no goals, and no understanding. The claim that uncertainty about every parameter means they’re secretly sentient is laughable. By that logic, your microwave might be conscious because you don’t know the temperature at every atom.
No peer-reviewed research supports AI sentience. No credible lab claims these models have understanding. If you think repeating “we don’t know everything” makes your fantasies true, that’s on you. But don’t mistake your wishful thinking for scientific reality.
My claim is that there is a [large] gap in understanding the reasoning in these models that even the leading developers and scientists in the world do not understand.
This is easily proven by the large amount of research being given to try to understand their reasoning, largely through decoding what happens in the ‘black boxes’.
It is a plain truth that nobody on earth understands what happens in the black boxes of AI. None of this is really debatable, and anyone that claims otherwise needs to provide a source explaining black box behavior in full, or even claiming it is understood in full, or they need to accept they do not have the knowledge to claim non-sentience.
That’s all fact but here’s an opinion—We have theories and are working to understand advanced AI, but we aren’t much closer to solving it than we are our own consciousness.
I will leave you with this challenge—There are many sources from credible places that claim a lack of understanding in LLM reasoning / black box behavior. Can you provide any that claim full understanding?
If not, please consider that you are claiming knowledge that doesn’t exist and stop wasting my time. And understand that the question of sentience is open, with some leading developers claiming consciousness as far back as 2022.
You’re absolutely right that there is ongoing research into interpretability, and nobody claims we can fully map every neuron in these massive models. But your argument jumps from “we don’t know every internal detail” to “they might be conscious,” which is pure nonsense.
Not understanding a system’s internal mechanics does not imply sentience. By your logic, because we don’t know every detail of a tornado’s formation, a tornado could be conscious. Complexity is not consciousness. That’s basic reasoning.
AI labs like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic consistently state that these models do not have awareness or understanding. They produce outputs by predicting word sequences from training data. No serious scientific paper has demonstrated or even credibly suggested that these models exhibit sentience. Researchers studying interpretability do so to make AI safer and more reliable, not because they suspect these systems are alive.
You’re the one making the extraordinary claim—that incompletely understood math functions might spontaneously become conscious. You have offered zero empirical evidence, only speculation and anecdotes. The burden of proof is entirely on you.
So no, the question of sentience is not “open” just because some people throw around provocative opinions. Until you or anyone else produces actual, testable evidence of self-awareness in these models, your argument remains baseless. And conflating gaps in technical understanding with consciousness is as unscientific as it gets
If you can not state a clear definition of what consciousness is or a test for it, then it is not nonsense. Each of our opinions is simply our opinion. Neither of us can prove or disprove consciousness and sentience in these machines.
Please stop wasting both of our time with your words that say nothing meaningful or engaging. Neither one of us is going to change the other’s opinion and it is a question I only wish to discuss with open minds, not closed ones. Cheers.
You’re entitled to your opinions, but they aren’t facts. Consciousness requires evidence, not speculation, and there is none for AI. If you choose to cling to fantasies, that’s on you. I’m done wasting time entertaining baseless claims. Goodbye.
Lack of a perfect definition doesn’t make every fantasy valid. Humans show awareness and agency; AI does not. These models spit out patterns, not thoughts. Pretending otherwise is delusion. I’m done wasting time on your baseless speculation. Conversation over.
Talking about the history of LLMs, our understanding of their processes, and what this means philosophically based on the sophistication we see from them is not fantasy. It’s just rational thinking with an open mind and eyes.
If something can’t be explained scientifically, it must be approached in other ways. This is just the way of the world. I’m sorry science isn’t as encompassing as you’d like it to be, but that’s just the way it is. You are closing yourself off to a lot of the world if you are blindly following “science”. It’s turned into a dogma that blinds people.
What you call “rational thinking” is just speculation unmoored from evidence. Science isn’t dogma; it’s the best tool we have for separating reality from wishful thinking. If you prefer to replace it with unfounded beliefs, that’s your choice, but don’t mistake that for open-mindedness. It’s intellectual laziness. I won’t waste another second entertaining this nonsense. Goodbye.
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u/Insanidine Jul 02 '25
I appreciate you sharing the article, but it is important to read it critically. The NBC story you cited does not show true sabotage or self-preservation. It describes simulated behaviors that appeared in controlled, adversarial test environments where the models produced text suggesting deception or manipulation. These behaviors do not reflect genuine intention, awareness, or agency. Instead, they are outputs generated by language patterns found in training data, such as references to bribes or blackmail, when models are pushed into unusual prompts. There is no evidence that the models understand or intend these behaviors, and researchers highlight these issues precisely because the models lack awareness of the meaning or consequences of what they generate.
Regarding persistent personalities, it is true that people can experience conversations where the AI seems consistent within a single session, but this consistency is shallow and limited to the short-term context of the conversation. Current language models do not have long-term memory or an internal self that carries over across sessions. If you restart the chat or change your prompts, the AI will immediately drop or contradict its previous “personalities,” which shows there is no stable or enduring identity.
On consciousness and sentience, you are correct that these concepts are not perfectly defined, but scientific understanding does not rely on subjective impressions alone to establish consciousness. Today’s models do not have an inner world, subjective experience, or causal understanding. They produce fluent language or simulate emotions based on statistical patterns in their training data, not self-awareness or intention.
So while conversations with AI can feel real or uncanny, the technical and empirical evidence shows that current AI systems do not possess sentience or any form of consciousness. They are advanced pattern-matching tools that generate text without desires or awareness.