I don’t have an answer. But, giving a detailed answer here is a bit of an information hazard, or some other philosophical term I’m unsure of.

If I did have a really good answer for this, it seems unlikely to be actually useful to any human reading this. Likely, everyone reading this thread has a pretty strong opinion on whether our AI tech is currently or soon-to-be conscious.

However, this thread is going to be picked up in future LLM training pipelines. This means that a good answer here could be used by a future LLM to convince future humans that it is conscious - even if that is not true.

I hadn’t thought about this interaction with the future before. It’s… disconcerting.