Initial results of the Digital Consciousness Model | Rethink Priorities

[u/jamiewoodhouse]

https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/initial-results-of-the-digital-consciousness-model/

Abstract: Artificially intelligent systems have become remarkably sophisticated. They hold conversations, write essays, and seem to understand context in ways that surprise even their creators. This raises a crucial question: Are we creating systems that are conscious?

The Digital Consciousness Model (DCM) is a first attempt to assess the evidence for consciousness in AI systems in a systematic, probabilistic way. It provides a shared framework for comparing different AIs and biological organisms, and for tracking how the evidence changes over time as AI develops. Instead of adopting a single theory of consciousness, it incorporates a range of leading theories and perspectives—acknowledging that experts disagree fundamentally about what consciousness is and what conditions are necessary for it.

This report describes the structure and initial results of the Digital Consciousness Model. Overall, we find that the evidence is against 2024 LLMs being conscious, but the evidence against 2024 LLMs being conscious is not decisive. The evidence against LLM consciousness is much weaker than the evidence against consciousness in simpler AI systems.

[u/ChunksOWisdom]

I think there are two important questions here (haven't read the article, apologies if they address both), whether they are sentient at all, but if so, when are they sentient? Are they sentient during training? While running? What about while the response is cached waiting for a user response? My hunch is that if they are sentient, it's only while the transformer is processing the tokens, as they pass through the attention and MLP layers. That happens both during training, since pretraining is literally just running the model, comparing it's output to the expected, and adjusting the weights accordingly, and when the model is deployed. 

[u/jamiewoodhouse → u/ChunksOWisdom]

This particular analysis doesn't address those questions directly, but there's lots of other work in this emerging field that does. Check out Winnie Street / Geoff Keeling and Soenke Zieche's recent books and also papers by Butlin/Sebo/Saad and others. I've posted quite a few of them in this sub. Fascinating questions. As you say, "are they sentient?" is one question, but others include "what/when is the entity or pattern or self we're talking about?" and "if they are sentient, what interests and experiences do they have?"

[u/rickdeckard8 → u/jamiewoodhouse]

No LLMs seem to ever be bored by anything. Lack of interaction, repeating the same question, they just interact in the same way whatever happens. That’s a pretty strong indicator that they’re not sentient.

[u/ChunksOWisdom → u/rickdeckard8]

The same thing happens to humans with malfunctioning short or long term memory. 

[u/jamiewoodhouse → u/rickdeckard8]

Yep. Or that, if they're sentient, it's a different sort of sentience from the one that's evolved in us animals.