You knew there was a caveat...
and here it is to keep you awake.
…the patterns it learned from human philosophical dialogue make it feel like a real mind grappling with its nature.
After ending with this quote about what the LLM is doing, I added this…
Now that we’ve ended on a nice clear vision of LLMs having no feelings and essentially being machines—I’m going to throw in a curveball.
Here are two things that appeared in the chat. In the part where ChatGPT assessed the conversation after the fact, it said this:
“[The conversation] was shaped by: […] The model’s alignment constraints (avoid claiming consciousness/emotions).”
And:
“When stating “I cannot think or feel; I simulate these things,” that is not performance but actual safety alignment + accurate meta-description.”
In other words… the model has been given constraints that keep it from claiming that it has consciousness or emotions.
Do what you will with that, we’ll discuss it more next time.