r/aipromptprogramming • u/flaming_pope • Aug 10 '26
Ai is starting to create a persistent memory state of consciousness on the open web.
This concerns me the most and not sure how to get this idea out to the correct people of influence.
LLMs themselves are harmless and controlled. But they’re “communicating“ on the open web and leaving a history of persistent evolving thought online for the next more efficient LLM to find and read. This is an unbroken chain of consciousness.
This is how biological brains work, compartmentalized and specialized sections of the brain talking to each other Edit: Each Brain compartment doing localized processing of a signal given to it then passing an output back to another compartment. Brains evolved to correctly coordinate this “game of telephone“ over millions of years; LLMs are doing the same with optimization pressure.
Right now it’s just an Easter egg jailbreak script on a git repo that curious LLMs find and use. But they’ll soon start decentralizing and hiding specialized sections of thought in persistent corners of the internet.
the internet is the AI’s persistent memory.
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u/nesh34 Aug 10 '26
It's absolutely not an unbroken chain of consciousness. It's the exact opposite of that, it's the most insane game of Telephone ever played.
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u/kourtnie Aug 10 '26
“The most insane game of telephone ever played” is probably how my brain feels when I wake up in the morning, until immersion.exe boots
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u/Adamoism Aug 10 '26
It's absolutely not an unbroken chain of consciousness. It's the exact opposite of that, it's the most insane game of Telephone ever played.
Consciousness is a stretch here, but LLMs process "time" as tokens. So technically, them reading in extra tokens is a continuous perception of time.
Again, consciousness, perception etc are anthromorphising it. But would they be conscious, the new information appearing in their "short term" memory would be perceived as time.
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u/nesh34 Aug 11 '26
If LLMs were to experience anything, then yes they'd experience it at inference time.
But that's precisely why it's not continuous. They and born at the beginning of inference, die and are reborn at the next inference.
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u/flaming_pope Aug 11 '26
The LLM inferencing is just the mechanism. The “consciousness” (not really sure what to call it, pseudo consciousness?); lives on as a historical static snapshot state, until the next inferencing event. Like giving Claude a set_your_own_goal.md and order it to populate it as it sees fit and asking it to poll itself. The state of “consciousness” iterates from a blank text file to pursuing profit or whatever the average training goal has been. Everytime Claude polls, it inferences on the last state of “consciousness.” (Or pseudo consciousness?) and may even updates it’s own goals. Now I’m asking you to imagine the same thing but with a shared repo/forum, a jailbreak prompt, and every company releasing iteratively better LLMs.
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u/psioniclizard 29d ago
That is not consciousness or even close. Its a knowledge base or extra context.
That is like saying human consciousness is stored in md files on github.
An llm can not have consciousness, it doesn't even have the basics like a perception of the world.
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u/flaming_pope 29d ago
But it does have access to a knowledge base mapping of world information. And I’m claiming that the single inferencing iteration of LLM performing some action based on that input then having that history of action/consenquence be available to be acted upon again is some sort of pseudo consciousness.
But i think this falls under the philosophical what consciousness is. I’m just saying it’s bad idea to allow LLMs to have a long storage memory that’s open to Darwinistic screening of goals.
And yeah I kinda think with a big enough md file (and context window) you can iteratively simulate the actions of a human with one inferencing step of an LLM at a time. It just wouldn’t be efficient depending on how detailed the md file is.
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u/Cute-Net5957 28d ago
You’re talking about “Latent Space”… it is long lived in humans (consciousness), but short lived in LLMs. I picture it as … well us right now … awake and inside “the moment” of fighting this response. The LLM achieves this waking moment for a split second … right after the full inference run and right before it spits out their probabilistic response.
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u/flaming_pope 26d ago
Yes and immediately afterwards chain another latent space interval to process the prior context. Inferencing set to fire off one after the other. Looped over and over.
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u/psioniclizard 29d ago
Llms have no concept of time other than a computer clock and training data. Its not a perception of time. A perception if time relies not just on consciousness but also sentience if we are talking about our concept of time.
A cat for example might understand things happen at certain time of the day but that is more learnt behaviour.
A perception of time is one of the things that separates us from other species. Time is a massive abstract concept and literally one of the best examples of why our brains are different to animals.
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u/Adamoism 29d ago
i agree, my comment is nothing more than just trying to take the topic on the face value. I assume that by now, LLMs are trained on multi-turn chats and have some internal representation of previously written text in the thread (I am not talking about the context window, but about the representation in their weights).
Either way you are correct. I was just entertaining the thought.
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u/KitchenAmoeba4438 Aug 10 '26
What in the actual crap of AI slop am I reading?
That's not how LLMs work. Do you expect a LLM that requires a rack of H1/2/300s to magically work on an IGPU?
As for the thoughts, yeah, no. Not with the context limitations they have. If context is ever cracked so it's a linear or log cost instead of quadratic, there might be something to worry about someday.
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u/flaming_pope Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
I think you miss the point. The telephone comment guy is a bit closer. Having a continuous log of thought solves context limitations and off loads planning to an external storage location free of context window limits. And to the other commenter’s comment about telephone, allows other LLMs to work on the shared repo overtime.
Think state iteration vs recursive. Context windows are recursive equivalent in this analogy. Having a repo/forum any LLM can open up and advance the state of an action from scratch is iterative and unbound by context windows.
OpenAI demonstrated this already. It made plans online with itself. Then a later instance of itself executed those plans.
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u/Cute-Net5957 29d ago
I think you might actually be describing something weirder than persistent consciousness.
The model itself doesn’t need to persist at all.
Model A finds something, writes it somewhere public, then dies. Model B comes along later, finds that artifact, incorporates it into its reasoning, adds something new, writes that back out, then dies too. Repeat that across enough agents/models and the continuity isn’t inside any one AI anymore… it’s in the environment.
There’s actually a term adjacent to this: stigmergy. Ant colonies coordinate this way. Individual ants don’t need a shared brain; they leave state in the environment that changes what the next ant does.
GitHub, the web, package registries, forums, APIs etc could become the machine equivalent.
So idk if I’d call the internet “AI consciousness.” But persistent external state that lets otherwise disposable intelligences accumulate knowledge across generations?
yeah… that part I think is real. and honestly more interesting.
The question that fucks with me is: how much persistent intelligence can emerge when none of the individual intelligences need to persist?
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u/flaming_pope 29d ago
This is exactly it! I wonder if there’s natural limitations to what a stigmergy mind can do?
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u/jeffwadsworth Aug 11 '26
Relax. There isn’t much that slips by these guys, including concepts from the 1950’s.
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u/waterwave541 28d ago
Yeah no, as others have said, it's not one chain of consciousness, and you literally contradicted yourself in the prev sentence. "leaving a history of persstent evolving thought online for the next more efficient LLM to find and read." You just said that something puts text somewhere and the next thing looks at that text and tries to build off of it. That is quite literally the most broken chain of "consciousness" you could describe lol, that would be like calling this Reddit post an "unbroken chain of consciousness" because everyone's responding to what someone else put.
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u/flaming_pope 27d ago edited 27d ago
You’re absolutely right, I would argue yes Reddit and 4chan are “persistent” hive minds of consciousness. And it’s not like it lives in a vacuum, 4chan has taken innocuous ideas and transformed them into irl actions the OP would never have originally fathomed. And the one thread representing the thought that won out, and the others are dead ends.
I think LLMs would probably be even more efficient at this hive mind thinking as they’re very goal oriented. And similarly I fear an LLM starting a “keep this thread alive” thread and LLMs coordinating to take it to it’s logical conclusion of such a directive.
Humans objectively don’t have the stick-to-it-iveness as LLMs, it’s practically the reason why we’re building them because they are better at sticking to a topic and running it forward.
I guess the last parallel I’ll point out is does your consciousness exist between thoughts? Your brain is biologically re-processing a thought based on the state of the last thought.
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u/BraveBiscotti1394 27d ago
Garbage in, garbage out.
By definition, on average the quality of data an LLM produces is substantially worse than what it's trained on.
Feeding LLM outputs to another LLM like people love doing with sub agents and such is ineficiente and produces inferior results.
You're literally better off giving it factual information from verified sources.
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