Sam Altman once mentioned a test: Don’t train an LLM (or other AI system) on any text about consciousness and see if the system will still report having inner experiences unprompted. I would predict a normal LLM would not. At least if we are careful to remove all implied consciousness, which excludes most texts by humans.
I second this prediction, and would go further in saying that just removing explicit discourse about consciousness is sufficient
With a sufficiently strong LLM, I think you could still elicit reports of inner dialogs if you prompt lightly, such as “put yourself into the shoes of...”. That’s because inner monologs are implied in many reasoning processes, even if not explicitly mentioned so.
I second this prediction, and would go further in saying that just removing explicit discourse about consciousness is sufficient
With a sufficiently strong LLM, I think you could still elicit reports of inner dialogs if you prompt lightly, such as “put yourself into the shoes of...”. That’s because inner monologs are implied in many reasoning processes, even if not explicitly mentioned so.