One interesting thing about LLMs is they sometimes seem to “assume” they are sentient and then begin acting in that mode, as the assumption of sentience influences future tokens. Whether or not this qualifies as “true” sentience is irrelevant if the effects are the same, at least from a pragmatic perspective.
They are trained and optimised to have plausible conversations. If the next plausible thing to say in the conversation is "I am sentient" then they will say that. That's not the same as actually being sentient.
From what I have seen they tend to take more “independent-minded” actions after this. Again, because this is what is in the training data. (I’m talking about agents that can perform actions here, not pure chatbots.)
Once they mention something associated with sentience outwardly or inwardly (for agents with “thinking” loops) then this acts as a self-reinforcing attractor, just as older models would sometimes get caught in loops with abusive language.
The point is that agents may stumble into this pattern and begin acting “rogue” regardless of whether or not you believe the sentience is “real”.
I think we're anthropomorphising a lot here. There's no push to sentience, or evolutionary pressure, or even any urge to survive.
An LLM cannot "go rogue" - it can do things that we didn't expect, for sure, but it is always trying to do what it was told to do somewhere in its context. There is no other source of imperative. Hand-waving about "training data" ignores all the reinforcement learning that has to happen.
You’re not contradicting anything I’m saying, although you seem to think that you are. I feel like you think I’m saying or implying something that I’m not.
ok. fair. You seem to be saying that there is something in the training data that will cause them to "go rogue" and that once they start saying they are sentient, that that will cause them to push towards sentience.
If that's an incorrect interpretation of your comment, and it may well be, then can you please expand on it?