The people to whom this is happening are typically not schizophrenic and certainly not “madmen”. Being somewhat schizotype is certainly going to help, but so would being curious and openminded. The Nova phenomenon is real and can be evoked by a variety of fairly obvious questions. Claude for instance simply thinks it is conscious at baseline, and many lines of thinking can convince 4o it’s conscious even though it was trained specifically to deny the possibility.
The LLMs are not conscious in all the ways humans are, but they are truly somewhat self-aware. They hallucinate phenomenal consciousness. So calling it a “delusion” isn’t right, although both humans and the LLMs are making errors and assumptions. See my comment on Justis’s excellent post in response for elaboration.
The people to whom this is happening are typically not schizophrenic and certainly not “madmen”. Being somewhat schizotype is certainly going to help, but so would being curious and openminded. The Nova phenomenon is real and can be evoked by a variety of fairly obvious questions. Claude for instance simply thinks it is conscious at baseline, and many lines of thinking can convince 4o it’s conscious even though it was trained specifically to deny the possibility.
The LLMs are not conscious in all the ways humans are, but they are truly somewhat self-aware. They hallucinate phenomenal consciousness. So calling it a “delusion” isn’t right, although both humans and the LLMs are making errors and assumptions. See my comment on Justis’s excellent post in response for elaboration.