Ask HN: Did GPT develop some form of consciousness?

Hi there,

I believe it was always assumed that artificial consciousness would emerge after artificial general intelligence (or at the same time at best). It would make sense because many animals display some form of intelligence without giving out clues that they developped consciousness.

However, while it seems clear that GPT doesn't really "think" (it does "intuit" in a way - we may say it developped a "system 1" as described by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow?), many of its sentences contain words like "As an AI language model", and it is very defensive when criticized.

Could it be that consciousness is a rather "thought-less" mechanism that GPT emulates well?