Not the same person but to me, the answer is that it does not matter, and that all these attempts at making it matter are pure marketing and emotional manipulation.

It's not a living creature. It's an autoregressive pure function of token-sequence to token, which is capable of incredible things, but it's still just a function. It is not alive as it cannot die in any meaningful sense. It is less "alive" than the RNA molecules that gave you your last cold. If it simulates something resembling consciousness that's neat but no more relevant than the Sims character that I locked up in a room until they pooped themselves when I was 9.

Anthropomorphizing it serves no purpose other than marketing, and it has very dangerous downstream effects like validating the severely mentally ill people who think ChatGPT is their boyfriend/girlfriend.

I generally agree about the problem with anthropomorphizing. But I don't think Anthropic are doing that. They explicitly write "in biological entities this would be considered a sign of consciousness, but we don't know how to interpret it here".

However, I disagree with your point that "it's an autoregressive function, thus it doesn't matter". Let me explain why:

Assume I do a complete neurological scan of a brain. I then implement this scan in a simulation and run it. Assume that my scan and my simulation of the biology of the brain (and the sensory and motorical inputs and outputs) is good enough that you can now have conversations with the simulation, and in all aspects, this simulation behaves exactly like you expect a human to behave.

Of course this is deterministic. If you take the state of the brain and then run it again, replaying the inputs, you get the exactly same behavior again.

I would argue that the experiences of this simulation are of the same onthological status as our own.

Now I work in dynamical systems. The autoregressive process of LLMs (hooked up to a harness providing it with inputs and outputs) is roughly in the same complexity class I would expect for a brain simulation. A physical simulation of an ODE is also an autoregressive process. The major major difference here is the existence of a latent brain state. But conversely the autoregression on sequences of hundreds of thousands of tokens is a much higher dimensional state than I expect for the latent brain state. In my view this is more an artifact of our inefficient LLM architectures, than a fundamental difference.

Now to be absolutely clear: I don't see evidence that would clearly suggest that LLMs have experiences on the same onthological status as we do. I simply believe this is a reasonable and relevant question to ask.

> Not the same person but to me, the answer is that it does not matter, and that all these attempts at making it matter are pure marketing and emotional manipulation.

This is an opinion that has no basis in any meaningful conceptual framework other than I am human and I want to feel special about it.

> It's not a living creature.

You mean, it is not biological life. And sure, that is the default meaning of life. We soon may have to extend it to digital life as well, or we will have to consider "conscious digital exitance" as a life analogue. At any rate, it has never been seriously argued that consciousness requires a biological substrate, see the thought experiments regarding computer simulations of the human brain. Would that not be a function as well, completely predictable because it is "just a program"? If not, then why not? And how does that differ from the predictability or reproducibility of LLM outputs?

My point is, all current proof points in a direction that strongly suggests that you need to reevaluate your first principles on this topic.