Comment by calf
3 hours ago
Arguably LLMs are showing that self awareness or self reference is a property that comes "for free" or as a corollary of more generic requirements. It used to be that self/consciousness would be a very mysterious and difficult thing to achieve but the point is that in practice they didn't even have to try, it just came as a byproduct of learning from the input data (corpus of human examples), and also the ability to talk about arbitrary things and thus itself.
They very clearly are not self aware. I regularly see them responding to their own statements as you/your (i.e. not having been generated by themselves). They do generally generate language in a manner consistent with the self awareness that we have and encode in our language, but that's the limit of it. Its the appearance of self awareness not actual self awareness.
In which case the computer can save a lot of bother and use printf("I'm self-aware"); Job done.