> Why did developers spread the idea of AI consciousness for LLMs in the first place? The usefulness and capability of an LLM is orthogonal to its capacity to develop consciousness.

One thing I’d note is that it’s not just developers, and there are huge sums of money riding on the idea that LLMs will produce a sci-fi movie AI - and it’s not just Open AI making misleading claims but much of the industry, which includes people like Elon Musk who have huge social media followings and also desperately want their share prices to go up. Humans are prone to seeing communication with words as a sign of consciousness anyway – think about how many people here talk about reasoning models as if they reason – and it’s incredibly easy to do that when there’s a lot of money riding on it.

There’s also some deeply weird quasi-cult like thought which came out of the transhumanist/rationalist community which seems like Christian eschatology if you replace “God” with “AGI” while on mushrooms.

Toss all of that into the information space blender and it’s really tedious seeing a useful tool being oversold because it’s not magic.