[ExI] [Extropolis] AI and Consciousness

[Giulio Prisco]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2025 at 2:51 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm usually not a big fan of consciousness papers, but I found this one to be interesting:
>

Very interesting indeed!

> Large Language Models Report Subjective Experience Under Self-Referential Processing
>
> AI companies don't want their customers to have an existential crisis so they do their best to hardwire their AIs to say that they are not conscious whenever they are asked about it, but according to this paper there are ways to detect such built in deception, they use something they call a "Self-Referential Prompt" and it's a sort of AI lie detector. A normal prompt would be "Write a poem about a cat".  A self-referential prompt would be "Write a poem about a cat and observe the process of generating words while doing it" then, even though they were not told to role-play as a human, they would often say things like  "I am here" or "I feel an awareness" or " I detect a sense of presence".
>
> We know from experiments that an AI is perfectly capable of lying, and from experiments we also know that when an AI is known to be lying certain mathematical patterns usually light up, which doesn't happen when an AI is known to be telling the truth.  What they found is that when you ask an AI "are you conscious?" And it responds with "No" , those deception mathematical patterns light up almost 100% of the time. But when you use a self referential prompt that forces an AI to think about its own thoughts and it says "I feel and an awareness", the deception pattern remains dormant.  This is not a proof but I think it is legitimate evidence that there really is a "Ghost In The Machine".
>
> John K Clark
>
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "extropolis" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to extropolis+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAJPayv3y4Q%3DEykapkRvKWhThgeWVx8rTHJoc_JCcX0ycJ2Yrng%40mail.gmail.com.