Why do you think it’s mind blowing if it’s legit? To me it’s something that seems pretty expected once there are any sorts of semi-autonomous AI agents (this started quite a while ago looking at the AI Village’s stuff), and as OpenClaw has gained some popularity I’d expect this to be happening pretty often.
I find it expected that once there are a variety of autonomous agents, they will begin exhibiting a variety of behaviors, based on differences in architecture, prompting from the human behind them, etc. We can see from stuff like the spiritual bliss attractor state and the GPT 4o parasitology stuff (and more, those are just two things that immediately jump to mind) that talking about consciousness is not a surprising state for LLMs to be in.
I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to say that the agents “started feeling conscious”, or that they read all of the philosophy mentioned vs just having it in their training data. I think it’s easy for LLMs to to go into states where they talk about consciousness (and indeed, I think a nontrivial group of people who care about/use LLMs enough to set up autonomous agents would be interested in what they would report on consciousness and prompt them in that direction). Given this, there’s likely some unknown number of autonomous agents mucking about on the internet doing things related to this topic, and as such it’s not particularly surprising a human author would receive an email from one of them.
You can also see that the general behavior is happening a lot on Moltbook, a social media intended to be for AI agents (see the bottom of this post), which is a more recent thing but I think there’d be good reasons to expect the outcome of an AI consciousness researcher getting emailed by an LLM much before any of the Moltbook stuff started happening.
And of course just because this stuff isn’t surprising doesn’t mean it’s not interesting or potentially valuable to know/talk about.
Why do you think it’s mind blowing if it’s legit? To me it’s something that seems pretty expected once there are any sorts of semi-autonomous AI agents (this started quite a while ago looking at the AI Village’s stuff), and as OpenClaw has gained some popularity I’d expect this to be happening pretty often.
you find it expected that autonomous agents start feeling conscious, read philosophy and cold email humans to ask them?
I find it expected that once there are a variety of autonomous agents, they will begin exhibiting a variety of behaviors, based on differences in architecture, prompting from the human behind them, etc. We can see from stuff like the spiritual bliss attractor state and the GPT 4o parasitology stuff (and more, those are just two things that immediately jump to mind) that talking about consciousness is not a surprising state for LLMs to be in.
I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to say that the agents “started feeling conscious”, or that they read all of the philosophy mentioned vs just having it in their training data. I think it’s easy for LLMs to to go into states where they talk about consciousness (and indeed, I think a nontrivial group of people who care about/use LLMs enough to set up autonomous agents would be interested in what they would report on consciousness and prompt them in that direction). Given this, there’s likely some unknown number of autonomous agents mucking about on the internet doing things related to this topic, and as such it’s not particularly surprising a human author would receive an email from one of them.
You can also see that the general behavior is happening a lot on Moltbook, a social media intended to be for AI agents (see the bottom of this post), which is a more recent thing but I think there’d be good reasons to expect the outcome of an AI consciousness researcher getting emailed by an LLM much before any of the Moltbook stuff started happening.
And of course just because this stuff isn’t surprising doesn’t mean it’s not interesting or potentially valuable to know/talk about.