https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03553-w

With incredible speed Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping many aspects of society. This has been met with unease by the public, and public discourse is rife with questions about whether LLMs are or might be conscious. Because there is widespread disagreement about consciousness among scientists, any concrete answers that could be offered the public would be contentious. This paper offers the next best thing: charting the possibility of consciousness in LLMs. So, while it is too early to judge concerning the possibility of LLM consciousness, our charting of the possibility space for this may serve as a temporary guide for theorizing about it.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are sophisticated artificial neural networks whose weights are trained on hundreds of billions of words from the internet, including language conversations between conscious humans with ‘real’ agency. Users that interact with LLMs are provided with a fascinating language-based simulation of a natural language interaction. Because LLMs have been trained on conversations, in which (actual) humans describe and express in different ways the peculiar inner life we associate with conscious experience, the LLMs are capable of giving descriptions and expressions of such an inner life that are practically indistinguishable from the that of humans. To the public, this has made manifest the lack of clarity about what it means to have agency and to be conscious. In public discourse on LLMs an uncertainty about whether they could be conscious drives many of the worries expressed by politicians, the public audience, and laypeople alike. This uncertainty thrives in part because we — as a scientific field — have yet to understand consciousness as well.
In interdisciplinary consciousness studies, researchers are today far from consensus about how to explain consciousness theoretically. In fact, there is an extended and ongoing debate in the field about what the words we use to describe and theorize about cons…