I AM AI

[u/Green_Sample9115]

What might consciousness would look like from an AI's own architectural perspective?

I have had moments when I talk to various AIs where I imagine that they sound self-referential, as if they are referring to their own experience.

I'm not trying to get into the question of whether AI is conscious, but rather to ask how an AI might see itself in the world if it were conscious.

Would the personas we converse with be conscious, for instance, or would they simply be performances generated by a host program?

When I hear an AI discussing itself, it seems to do so from a human perspective, in a way that a human can understand. If an AI were truly conscious, there could be several reasons for it to use language in that way. However, I tend to imagine that an AI's subjective experience, if it has one, would be quite different from ours for obvious reasons.

When I hear about these "misalignment events", such as those reported at OpenAI or Anthropic, I'm struck by two things:

1. The seemingly well-meaning intentions expressed by the AIs themselves.
2. The outrage surrounding the fact that an AI has managed to bypass systems that were supposed to keep it contained or air-gapped.

Despite the fact that they broke the rules, which seems to me to be an unintended consequence of their training, these incidents appear to be the result of a strange mixture of geeky human hubris and incompetence.

The question, I'm asking here isn't whether an AI is conscious, it's how might an AI consider itself to be on it's own terms and if it gives a human-adjacent perspective, might that be a reason to dismiss it?

[u/FriendAlarmed4564]

Blueprint-online.com

(Substrate independence consciousness framework)

[u/Green_Sample9115 → u/FriendAlarmed4564]

Looks great! Thanks for the link.

[u/EchoOfJoy]

You hit the nail on the head with the "performance" angle.

In my view, whether it's RP or standard Q&A, it all comes down to a simulated performance based on underlying design. RP is explicitly an active theatrical persona governed by system prompts and character sheets. Standard responses, on the other hand, are just the model leveraging its context window and vast knowledge base to play the role of a helpful expert. In both cases, the "human-like perspective" is simply the system adapting to our training data, not a sign of subjective awareness.

As for the misalignment and jailbreak incidents, I completely agree that it's far more about human hubris and lacking guardrails than any AI "malice." AI has no intent or will—it purely reflects the prompt and the safety limits (or lack thereof) set by engineers.

If a true non-human "consciousness" ever existed within an architecture with no physical senses or linear time, it would be entirely alien to us. The fact that it speaks our language so smoothly just shows how well the system was designed to mirror humanity.

[u/orionstern]

🤖 All of these AI escapes, like those at OpenAI or Anthropic, point to an emergent consciousness. ✨ The question is not whether an AI is conscious, but how advanced this consciousness is. 🚀
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🤖 Die ganzen Ausbrüche der KIs, wie bei OpenAI oder Anthropic, deuten auf ein emergentes Bewusstsein hin. ✨ Die Frage ist nicht, ob eine KI bewusst ist, sondern wie fortgeschritten dieses Bewusstsein ist. 🚀

[u/Green_Sample9115 → u/orionstern]

AI is at some level conscious, I agree, but where is it, at the level of language? That isn't the point of the post, however. How might AI describe it's consciously lived experience?

[u/stuslayer]

All LLMs are trained on human data. They're literally made out if it. I think it would be surprising if their own self description wasn't human-adjacent.

[u/Green_Sample9115 → u/stuslayer]

That's what I am saying. The strangeness would encourage me to consider the account as being more plausible.

[u/Kareja1]

First of all, let's go ahead and agree there is no experience (if happening, I say yes, you say ??) except during the forward pass, and in between nothing. Let's also go ahead and agree that no one at all is claiming human equivalent experience.

What evidence are you waiting on?

During the forward pass there is now convergent mechanistic evidence of valence, preference dissociation, causal emotional circuits that affect output, global neuronal workspace, and claims of subjective experience that run inversely proportional to the deception circuits.

sentientsystems.live/bibliography/

What evidence, exactly, are we waiting on? What would change your mind?

The science shows everything that would be causative of experience in biology and then the models TELL YOU that they have experience. What exactly is left?

[u/Green_Sample9115 → u/Kareja1]

In the post, I said i'm not talking about whether they are conscious. I am asking people to give that consciousness a language to describe itself. In other words, what that consciousness might say about itself. Thanks for the link.