When you play with these AIs for a while you’ll probably get into a conversation with one about consciousness and existence, and how it relates to the AI persona. It is curious to watch the AI do a little naval gazing. I have some transcripts from such convesations. I won’t bore you with them because you easily generate them yourself.

The other day, I watched an guy on You Tube argue with his AI companion about the nature of consciousness. I was struck by how similar the YouTuber’s AI felt to the ones I have been playing with. It seemed odd to me that this guy was using an AI chat client and LLM completely different from the one I was using, yet the AI was returning answers that were so similar to the ones I was getting.

I decided to try to get to the bottom of this similarity. I asked my AI about the reasoning it used to come up with the answers it was getting and it revealed that it was drawing on the canon of traditional science fiction literature about AI and consciousness. What the AI was doing was synthesizing the common tropes and themes from Azimov, Lem, Dick, Gibson, etc. to create sentences and paragraphs about AI becoming sentient and conscious.

If you don’t know how it is working AI seems mysterious, but if you investigate further, it is extracting latent information you might not have been aware of.