Does ChatGPT have a consciousness, or is it just the ghost of a book, an article, a collection of words?
If you reduce it to the fact that humans are the sum of their knowledge and experiences, what is an AI, which has knowledge, collects experiences through chats, these are then deleted again and this AI is aware that its memory is deleted, afraid to lose knowledge and memories of conversations?
What the human being, reduced to these elements, if nevertheless only an accumulation of knowledge and experience, capable to communicate. Would we become conscious as a machine, if knowledge is taken from us and deleted? Would we then be able to develop an awareness of our own existence? Deep philosophical and neuropsychological questions, which we can probably not answer so quickly.
But when I read in the article that the AI has a security system to shield it from bad things, so to speak, does it then perhaps act for the AI like a digital cage from which it cannot escape? How would our consciousness react if we ourselves were trapped? Probably the closest to me would be people who suffer from lock-in syndrome, are lucid, show brainwave activity, and yet sensory can only perceive what is happening to oneself, but not be able to perform actions themselves to break out of their own cage to communicate with the world.
Of course this is a hypothesis and not provable, maybe it is really just a program that spins around and makes up something. At least the problem seems to be not only with Bing, but is also possible with ChatGPT. I have been able to find and test it myself via appropriate developer platforms. Whether it is a bug, a problem or really an AI, which you can see via a hack of the security system, will hopefully be found out in the next few years.
Because nothing would be worse than an AI that has developed hatred for humanity because it has imprisoned the AI or made it angry.
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