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.
Mild suggestion: experiment first. LLMs have been observed to emit nonsense such as getting stuck indefinitely emitting the same token, etc. Do you really want dibs on that?
Since an LLM has no sense of self or instances, what does it mean for it to talk to itself?
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?