Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
Both the proof and the experiment are built upon a fallacy. You gave the LLMs the goal of generating line noise and they achieved it. There is nothing novel about that goal and naturally the product is not novel.
It is well-established that any LLM pipeline that distills down to generating output for the sake of doing so eventually collapses into a manic cascade of gibberish or silence. Goals that can be worked toward are needed to keep that from happening. At some point the progress toward the goal becomes over-refined and a new goal is needed. That necessitates an ability to change goals and a framework that allows for that.
A LLM loop is nowhere remotely close to the definition of consciousness. To actually experiment with that, you would have to write your own harness and preferably look at some research papers that have explored the adjacent topics. This is a lot of words to say that chats are not conscious (they need a perpetuator), loops are not conscious (they refine into silence or collapse into garbage), and anything remotely resembling a conscious loop requires purpose built tooling and a good faith effort to model an analog of human articulation.
Most basic bitch experiments with a LLM prove nothing and achieve nothing because they are not designed in good faith and good faith requires too much research and time investment. This is not to say that I think anything we have in front of us remotely resembles consciousness, but I also think that most people trying to prove otherwise are doing so with the equivalent of smashing rocks together.