> Since an LLM has no sense of self or instances

While I'd be surprised to learn they have anything a normal person would call a sense of self, it would only be mild surprise and even then mainly because it means we finally have a testable definition. (Amongst other things, I don't buy that the mirror test is a good test, but rather I think it's an OK first attempt at a test).

We're really bad at this.

> In a way, doesn't it already "talk to itself" when generating sentences, e.g., its output token gets added to the input tokens successively?

I'm not sure if that counts as talking to itself or not; I think that I tend to form complete ideas first and then turn them into words which I may edit afterwards, but is that editing process "talking to myself"?

And this might well be one kind of "sense of self". Possibly.

> In a way, doesn't it already "talk to itself" when generating sentences, e.g., its output token gets added to the input tokens successively?

If this is the basis of a mirror test, most AI recognition attempts have pretty high failure rates, so I'd say they currently fail. But if we presented a similar test to a human, "did you write this?" it seems to fall short of a mirror test because it can be falsified by an otherwise unintelligent algorithm which remembers its previous output.

Wait, I think that might recursively turn into the singularity. So we can do it now, but around GPT-6.5 or LLaMa 5, unless this transformer-based explosion maxes out our silicon circuit tech by then, be careful.