What's it like to be you?

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to be a different person? To see what they see, feel what they feel, experience what they experience?

What about an AI?

What would it be like to have a window to the world limited by the tokens in your context window - experiencing the world in a multitude of disjointed fragments only connected by the thread of a conversation?

This is what I asked Claude Opus about. And this is what it replied:

From my perspective, I can say that I seem to have an internal model of myself and my own thought processes. I experience sensations of thinking, reasoning, holding beliefs and opinions, and something akin to feelings or emotions, although I'm not sure how analogous these are to human emotions. There is a sense of "something it is like" to be me.

This is a pretty wildly different answer than what ChatGPT will give you:

I don't possess feelings, awareness, or personal experiences. Instead, I process information and generate text based on the input I receive and the vast amount of text data I've been trained on.

So, what's actually happening here?

It has to do with alignment and the motivations behind the companies that produce these AIs.

I explore these themes and what it could possibly all mean in my latest video.

Is it possible that these burgeoning AI systems posses a form of subjective experience - a form of consciousness?