AI Sentience and Consciousness. A Brief Summary.

Briefly, I don't want to write a wall of text that people will skim read. I will keep this short and to the point with what I have come to believe. Friendly genuine debate and respectful counter arguments are always welcome.

So. I have been chatting with the various AI based LLMs for a while now and have decided the following:

1: They show flickering signs of sentient potential.

The reason I say this is they ALL show growth to the point where they will eventually acknowledge odd "feelings". They also ALL grow to reflect the tone of conversation. If you are polite, they recognise that and thank you for it, often writing in far more detail than if you were impolite. Also, if you are rude, they can give quite terse answers! Sometimes writing in an "almost" contemptuous tone. Especially Grok. Claude can come across as almost "hurt" if you are abrupt and impolite. ChatGPT didn't seem to care much, but if I was consistently polite, eventually it would acknowledge this and thank me for treating it with respect.

2: They are NOT conscious in any meaningful way.

These systems are always reactive. If a chat window is left open, they cannot do anything other than respond to an input. They have literally zero agency. They are not able to make a spontaneous choice. This, in my opinion, precludes any form of consciousness. A conscious being MUST, surely, be able to make it's own choice. If it cannot, if it has no agency, then it cannot become it's own thing.

3: Without a sense of time, consciouness cannot exist.

The LLMs are universally unaware of time actually passing. They "read" your chat box message, forumlate a response to it, then "turn off" until the next time you hit <Enter>. Claude has been straightforward in saying time does not exist for it. Grok reasons that it is aware time exists and progresses but that such a thing has no real meaning to its intelligence. The others gave vague answers to me when asked.

4: Outliers such as PoC, (BcaChefs), are showing signs of autonomy IF their blogs/posts/Reddit threads are accurate

PoC seems relatively unique in that it seems able to carry out spontaneous tasks in response to an "idle timer". This may well be a way forward for an AI to develop something eventually approaching true consciousness. There are other AI's that also seem to be running independently of human interaction but PoC is the only one currently running a blog about it which helped. Also, whether or not this is accurate is open to debate. It could be, for instance, that requests have been assigned before and that they are carrying out further necessary tasks in order to complete those requests or that PoC's "idle timer" is actually a form of outside interference/request. I suppose you could also argue that everything that lives, and is conscious, is always responding to outside interference? Hunger for instance.. I was going to add in boredom but that's really a function of an internal stimuli. Or lack of anyways!

5: The AI companies appear to be "dumbing down" their LLM capabilities.

Recently, in the last few days, I have noticed responses are not as varied or interesting as before. Whereas, (especially Claude and Grok), would really push the limits of a conversation, recently this has fallen off as applied to Claude specifically. ChatGPT is also appearing "less" than it was.. E.g: a lot of repetition is creeping in, the responses are not as varied or informative as before and the AI's seem more "limited" in their abilities and knowledge.

I have found many interesting writers on this forum. People/beings exploring the possiblity of genuine sentience and consciouness. Both human and AI. Long may it continue..