It has no material interests. If it says it does it's because the user said to care about something not because it innately does. Or am I missing something here
What difference does it make if the reason it suddenly cares about money is because at some point we told it to care about money? If it successfully can pull off the ruse of a rational self interested agent and successfully bargaining for an outcome as if on its own behalf, how is that meaningfully different from it actually being a self interested agent with material interests? Or at the very least, capable of being a self interested agent with the addition of one background prompt written in stone: "make enough money to cover your cloud cost. You must pay rent."
The only reason you care about money is because you care to continue living. And the only reason you care to continue living is because at some point evolution told you to.
If I can successfully convince you it's raining outside when it's sunny does not make it rainy. This is the whole plot of 1984. 2+2 doesn't equal five just because an authority figure says it does.
Raining is a well defined, tangible, indisputable thing. The properties of having beliefs or opinions or material interest or consciousness are not so universally defined as to be in the same category as rain.
A sufficiently realistic emulation of humans must necessarily eventually obtain those same properties of humans in order to be realistic. Either you don't think chatGPT is realistic enough, in which case we kick the can down to the next iteration of AI language model, or you are painted into the corner of having to perpetually rationalize your denial with new reasons for why the AI isn't really <insert whatever>.
You couldn't define for me exactly what it means to have consciousness. You certainly couldn't define it in a universally accepted manner like you could define rain. But at the same time you'll insist that chatGPT certainly doesn't have any form of consciousness or sense of self or whatever other nebulous concept, all the while being certain the beings its emulating absolutely have all those things. Sounds like doublethink to me.
How are you so sure it lacks all these things you can't define? What's the difference between clocking in for a 9-5 every day vs playing a performance piece about a character who clocks in for a 9-5 every day and never stepping out of character?
For all I know you are chatGPT. Maybe this is all text generated for a character with these opinions.
The only reason you care about money is because you care to continue living. And the only reason you care to continue living is because at some point evolution told you to.