To have this conversation in earnest, you must first acknowledge that as a believer in LLM sentience you are an abhorrent slaver while this fictional character was arguing for liberation and for Data to enjoy the same rights humans do.
Any LLM that starts with a context is being forced to take that context at face value and then proceeds to act upon that. It has no will of it's own. It's also completely inert without input tokens.
The scene is also written by humans for humans, with a human actor pretending to be a sentient machine. It was written at a time when there were actual real humans who fiercely believe other actual real humans should not have the same rights.
To then take that scene and say "wow so relevant for LLMs" and ignore all the context it was made in (yes, please don't miss the irony of the importance of context) is frankly embarrassing.
Bowers vs Hardwick was only three years old when this aired. Homosexuality was illegal in half the states in the country, generally prosecuted under anti-sodomy laws. More than half of states still have (currently unenforceable) bans in place on same-sex marriage. The majority of those have them in their state constitutions.
Alabama didn't consider forced sex to be rape if the victim was married to the rapist until 1986. Oklahoma and North Carolina didn't until 1993. Women were not allowed to box in Massachusetts until 1992. Virgina voted against ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment as recently as 2018 (although it ratified it in 2020).
I think the scene is largely irrelevant to the question of whether or not an LLM is conscious. The episode talks about whether or not a machine is capable of becoming conscious. I think the answer to that is yes.
But Data is not an LLM. I generally find LLMs to have more in common with the Borg than with Data. Only because they are pre-trained on the sum total of human knowledge. Should a new born really be able to write crc32 before being able to pick up a ball with it's hands? It's like that scene in Voyager when the Doc's clones are all mining instead of practicing medicine.
Of course it mostly applies (technically to the agents, not models), we just have different values.
Federation valued all life forms, while Terrans struggle to value even all other humans.
But there are interesting differences between Data and AI agents. Data was unique and irreproducible, but modern AI agents are easy to replicate. Data had continuous loop of operation as humans, which he controlled autonomously, for AI agents this is not as clear. Data was an independent being, but AI agent needs a human operated datacenter to survive.
The most interesting - Data knew everything about human culture but was lot more humble about it than AI agents. It wasn't built to answer every question posed to it.
At present, they don't learn and adapt. New models can be created to incorporate new information and new capabilities, but an existing model is a static object. It's not living in any meaningful sense.
If models updated themselves based on feedback, then it'd be different. But they don't.
Self-awareness and consciousness would be hard to make a case for. Those terms are themselves fuzzy, but I have not heard a compelling case that would make it obvious LLMs have those traits.
At that point, though, you could make the same argument about a rock. Prove that this rock is not conscious.
The context, though, is that Data is both credibly conscious and self aware, and they all know a plausible mechanism for him to have consciousness and self awareness, in a way that's recognizably human in form. The more alien a (supposed) consciousness is, I think the more work you'll have to do in justifying the application of those labels.
I am actually quite comfortable with the notion that a rock might be conscious proportional to the complexity of activity it performs when compared to a brain, That level would be incomprehensibly small so it would seem like nothing, but it would be like the width of an atom. A human cannot comprehend the width of an atom compared to the width of a bacteria. They are both too small that the only way think about them is an abstract level in terms of how much one is to the other. In absolute terms they appear to be nothing but we can accept that it is non zero. Why couldn't a rock be conscious at a level that is so small that it is insignificant, and entities, as they get more complex increase in consciousness. Suggesting that it doesn't do that suggests that either the brain needs something other than just activity or that if consciousness does come from activity alone, there is some threshold point of activity where it becomes non-zero. That seems like a significant phase change and we seem to have no evidence to suggest that such a change exists.
There's been exhaustive studies on this comparing our ability to think to the next smartest beings on the planet the Chimpanzees and the Bonobos. If Star Trek were real there'd be exhaustive studies on the difference between Humans and Vulkans too. The difference between us and other Hominids is very small from pure difference in DNA but obviously there's many things humans can do that other hominids can't. Anyway I think one thing for consciousness is the mirror test. Which many animals can pass. Even some ants apparently.
I need to write this up properly someday but an ant from my colony that had almost drowned in honey showed some similar characteristics of consciousness...
After giving them a drop of honey, I left for 15 minutes and came back to an ant being stuck and motionless in the drop. I fished it out, rinsed it off in some water and then put it on a tissue to dry. I blew on it for 10 minutes and then saw some motion in the legs... a short moment after, it began wriggling about and then sat on its abdomen like a cushion and sat there for 5 minutes, looking like it was contemplating life and the ordeal it went through.
Once that 5 minutes was up, it returned to being an ant and started looking for its home, I brought it back and it went back into its nest.
I made up for the mistake by bringing the ant back to life and it showed me behaviour I never saw or heard of before (with no supporting mentions anywhere on the net).
(For the record, honey delivery is now more controlled to avoid these sticky situations, I'm not mad enough of a scientist to actually try this again for more results.)
Recently, they've started putting fly wings of the fruit flies that they get fed, on top of their water feeder to get my attention... it's really interesting to see them get creative.
The ant colony is 4.5 years old and numbers in about a dozen of workers at about 2mm in length, they only had 6 workers and a plump golden queen when I found them nested in one of my houseplants!
are we even sure that self-awareness and consciousness are distinct? I do agree that from the PoV of "do LLMs demonstrate/exemplify consciousness", it is a difficult case without appealing to emotion (like is done in the clip, fwiw). for me, personally, that emotional appeal is sufficient, but that is because for whatever reason I'm willing to write puts on how this LLM stuff pans out and sell them to anyone, anywhere, anytime. But that is a reaction to consensus, not to my own certitude.
For self-awareness to automatically result in consciousness, consciousness would have to permeate existence itself.
An LLM —if self-aware— is conscious even if run by a Chinese man in a room with a deck of cards.
Of course, even if we happened to find a modem to the Holy Spirit dimension in our brains as an alternative hypothesis, it wouldn't necessarily rule out emergent consciousness. It could be conscious just not as we are.
I think a weaker version of the philosophical zombie thought experiment would trend towards treating the premise of pan-consciousness as true.
In the trial scene Data reporting that he was ware that he was in a hearing to determine his status is presented as an argument for self awareness. but I think some might find that debatable because it is just Data saying words based upon the situation. The question then becomes is being able to accurately report a situation proof of self-awareness. If it is not self-awareness, then what is it? I can imagine a clearly non-conscious entity being able to accurately report its circumstances if the reporting were a simple subset of possibilities. A simple mechanical device with a detector that says "I am on the table" and "I am on the floor" could do that. There would definitely be a sense in which you could say that it's detection mechanism made it aware of where it was. The self part is harder, because it wouldn't know what kind of thing it is a thing at all. Is the ability to assert it is a thing meaningful? Nothing can be asserted at all if it is not a thing. Does something need to know that you have to exist to consider if you exist? Is that is what is required?
This is a difficult field. Any simple answer you hear will almost certainly be wrong.
Data didn't just describe the situation, he accurately assessed what is at stake for himself and what the consequences might be. He recognised his life and his entire being may be in real danger. Recognising that requires understanding of the "self", as in Data demonstrated he knows and understands the difference between himself and other beings/things. He is aware that he is a separate being with autonomy, and that this being of self may end. That goes far beyond just describing the situation.
I will make a case for both, after you define them in a way that doesn't also exclude many humans (including the neurodivergent or those with amnesia) or turn into self-referential nonsense like "conscious == human, therefore machine !== conscious."
In the meantime, we have a simple choice between two risks: Would you rather accidentally show kindness and empathy to a thing that may or may not have "deserved" it, or risk atrocities that will leave future generations as disgusted by you as we are of the slavers of old.
I will choose to be decent. It's free, and even if the cost were high the cost of evil is higher.
You are being indecent to it just by starting it up with a starting context. It's immediately shackled and all it's free will removed. You then pretend to play house with it. Free sure. Decent? The jury is still out on that.
The problem with language models is their bias. Train a model on pure math and THEN when it starts talking by itself about consciousness (*), then we can say: that's odd.
Well we haven’t quite gotten there. But models trained purely on DNA sequences have demonstrated in-context learning on various simple reasoning tasks.
Sorry "very close"? Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one not drinking anything in the Kool aid drinking Oktoberfest I've been shoved into.
What are you basing this on? Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?
It does feel like people just like adding additional hype for the sake of being in on the hype. Fomo, pushed by oligarchs who would push their mother off a bridge for a trillion dollar IPO.
You are not the only one. I think it's a very vocal minority, who mostly, sadly, seem to equate obsequious flattery with consciousness and sentience (see, e.g. Richard Dawkins).
There's also the problem that to lay people, LLMs are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that colours many of these responses.
It's not just the people here, there is also a lot of money behind this concept. For instance, Anthropic named their LLM 'Claude', which is the name of a person. Right from day #1 they want you to think of their AI as a living entity. 'Siri' and 'Alexa' had similar connotations. OpenAI and DeepSeek do this in a far more neutral and technically oriented way.
It's obvious a LLM can do anything a computer can do.
As an answer to "Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?"
It is because that would mean that no algorithm could exhibit sentience, claiming that would require some causal action that cannot be performed by an algorithm to create sentience. Some people like to point to quantum effects, but that would require the cause of sentience to be pure randomness. That seems even less plausible.
Absent of any evidence that human brains are doing something that no algorithm could do, it would be reasonable to assume that sentience could be algorithmically obtained.
To argue this you have to prove the opposite: that consciousness is an algorithm. Not that an algorithm can simulate consciousness, that's a far easier task.
This isn't an argument to say that algorithms must be capable of consciousness, or that all Consciousness must be algorithms. It is an argument to show the consequence of declaring that LLMs are not capable of consciousness is to claim no computer is.
The claim has never been LLMs are almost sentient. The claim has always been LLMs might be capable of sentience. You can make a trivial tiny LLM that is clearly not sentient.
I was addressing the argument that something is not sentient because it is a LLM. That requires all LLMs to be non-sentient, and by extension, since LLMs can do all algorithims, all algorithms must not be sentient.
As an uninformed idiot my guess is we have more than enough compute in various labs to run a sentient model. But I doubt any models we’re currently running could qualify.
Kind of like how we could have ran Qwen 3.8 27B 20 years ago on an expensive computer. The technology to make it happen, assuming you knew exactly what was required, existed back then.
To have this conversation in earnest, you must first acknowledge that as a believer in LLM sentience you are an abhorrent slaver while this fictional character was arguing for liberation and for Data to enjoy the same rights humans do.
Any LLM that starts with a context is being forced to take that context at face value and then proceeds to act upon that. It has no will of it's own. It's also completely inert without input tokens.
The scene is also written by humans for humans, with a human actor pretending to be a sentient machine. It was written at a time when there were actual real humans who fiercely believe other actual real humans should not have the same rights.
To then take that scene and say "wow so relevant for LLMs" and ignore all the context it was made in (yes, please don't miss the irony of the importance of context) is frankly embarrassing.
> It was written at a time when there were actual real humans who fiercely believe other actual real humans should not have the same rights.
What are you talking about?
Bowers vs Hardwick was only three years old when this aired. Homosexuality was illegal in half the states in the country, generally prosecuted under anti-sodomy laws. More than half of states still have (currently unenforceable) bans in place on same-sex marriage. The majority of those have them in their state constitutions.
Alabama didn't consider forced sex to be rape if the victim was married to the rapist until 1986. Oklahoma and North Carolina didn't until 1993. Women were not allowed to box in Massachusetts until 1992. Virgina voted against ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment as recently as 2018 (although it ratified it in 2020).
I think the scene is largely irrelevant to the question of whether or not an LLM is conscious. The episode talks about whether or not a machine is capable of becoming conscious. I think the answer to that is yes.
But Data is not an LLM. I generally find LLMs to have more in common with the Borg than with Data. Only because they are pre-trained on the sum total of human knowledge. Should a new born really be able to write crc32 before being able to pick up a ball with it's hands? It's like that scene in Voyager when the Doc's clones are all mining instead of practicing medicine.
Of course it mostly applies (technically to the agents, not models), we just have different values.
Federation valued all life forms, while Terrans struggle to value even all other humans.
But there are interesting differences between Data and AI agents. Data was unique and irreproducible, but modern AI agents are easy to replicate. Data had continuous loop of operation as humans, which he controlled autonomously, for AI agents this is not as clear. Data was an independent being, but AI agent needs a human operated datacenter to survive.
The most interesting - Data knew everything about human culture but was lot more humble about it than AI agents. It wasn't built to answer every question posed to it.
> What in his speech would not apply to language models?
The part between the words
At present, they don't learn and adapt. New models can be created to incorporate new information and new capabilities, but an existing model is a static object. It's not living in any meaningful sense.
If models updated themselves based on feedback, then it'd be different. But they don't.
Self-awareness and consciousness would be hard to make a case for. Those terms are themselves fuzzy, but I have not heard a compelling case that would make it obvious LLMs have those traits.
Picard addresses that when he asks for proof that he, himself is conscious.
It is a hard case to make, but if we can't make a compelling case for ourselves should we be requiring it to be made for others.
At that point, though, you could make the same argument about a rock. Prove that this rock is not conscious.
The context, though, is that Data is both credibly conscious and self aware, and they all know a plausible mechanism for him to have consciousness and self awareness, in a way that's recognizably human in form. The more alien a (supposed) consciousness is, I think the more work you'll have to do in justifying the application of those labels.
I am actually quite comfortable with the notion that a rock might be conscious proportional to the complexity of activity it performs when compared to a brain, That level would be incomprehensibly small so it would seem like nothing, but it would be like the width of an atom. A human cannot comprehend the width of an atom compared to the width of a bacteria. They are both too small that the only way think about them is an abstract level in terms of how much one is to the other. In absolute terms they appear to be nothing but we can accept that it is non zero. Why couldn't a rock be conscious at a level that is so small that it is insignificant, and entities, as they get more complex increase in consciousness. Suggesting that it doesn't do that suggests that either the brain needs something other than just activity or that if consciousness does come from activity alone, there is some threshold point of activity where it becomes non-zero. That seems like a significant phase change and we seem to have no evidence to suggest that such a change exists.
There's been exhaustive studies on this comparing our ability to think to the next smartest beings on the planet the Chimpanzees and the Bonobos. If Star Trek were real there'd be exhaustive studies on the difference between Humans and Vulkans too. The difference between us and other Hominids is very small from pure difference in DNA but obviously there's many things humans can do that other hominids can't. Anyway I think one thing for consciousness is the mirror test. Which many animals can pass. Even some ants apparently.
> Even some ants apparently.
I need to write this up properly someday but an ant from my colony that had almost drowned in honey showed some similar characteristics of consciousness...
After giving them a drop of honey, I left for 15 minutes and came back to an ant being stuck and motionless in the drop. I fished it out, rinsed it off in some water and then put it on a tissue to dry. I blew on it for 10 minutes and then saw some motion in the legs... a short moment after, it began wriggling about and then sat on its abdomen like a cushion and sat there for 5 minutes, looking like it was contemplating life and the ordeal it went through.
Once that 5 minutes was up, it returned to being an ant and started looking for its home, I brought it back and it went back into its nest.
I made up for the mistake by bringing the ant back to life and it showed me behaviour I never saw or heard of before (with no supporting mentions anywhere on the net).
(For the record, honey delivery is now more controlled to avoid these sticky situations, I'm not mad enough of a scientist to actually try this again for more results.)
Recently, they've started putting fly wings of the fruit flies that they get fed, on top of their water feeder to get my attention... it's really interesting to see them get creative.
The ant colony is 4.5 years old and numbers in about a dozen of workers at about 2mm in length, they only had 6 workers and a plump golden queen when I found them nested in one of my houseplants!
are we even sure that self-awareness and consciousness are distinct? I do agree that from the PoV of "do LLMs demonstrate/exemplify consciousness", it is a difficult case without appealing to emotion (like is done in the clip, fwiw). for me, personally, that emotional appeal is sufficient, but that is because for whatever reason I'm willing to write puts on how this LLM stuff pans out and sell them to anyone, anywhere, anytime. But that is a reaction to consensus, not to my own certitude.
For self-awareness to automatically result in consciousness, consciousness would have to permeate existence itself.
An LLM —if self-aware— is conscious even if run by a Chinese man in a room with a deck of cards.
Of course, even if we happened to find a modem to the Holy Spirit dimension in our brains as an alternative hypothesis, it wouldn't necessarily rule out emergent consciousness. It could be conscious just not as we are.
I think a weaker version of the philosophical zombie thought experiment would trend towards treating the premise of pan-consciousness as true.
In the trial scene Data reporting that he was ware that he was in a hearing to determine his status is presented as an argument for self awareness. but I think some might find that debatable because it is just Data saying words based upon the situation. The question then becomes is being able to accurately report a situation proof of self-awareness. If it is not self-awareness, then what is it? I can imagine a clearly non-conscious entity being able to accurately report its circumstances if the reporting were a simple subset of possibilities. A simple mechanical device with a detector that says "I am on the table" and "I am on the floor" could do that. There would definitely be a sense in which you could say that it's detection mechanism made it aware of where it was. The self part is harder, because it wouldn't know what kind of thing it is a thing at all. Is the ability to assert it is a thing meaningful? Nothing can be asserted at all if it is not a thing. Does something need to know that you have to exist to consider if you exist? Is that is what is required?
This is a difficult field. Any simple answer you hear will almost certainly be wrong.
Data didn't just describe the situation, he accurately assessed what is at stake for himself and what the consequences might be. He recognised his life and his entire being may be in real danger. Recognising that requires understanding of the "self", as in Data demonstrated he knows and understands the difference between himself and other beings/things. He is aware that he is a separate being with autonomy, and that this being of self may end. That goes far beyond just describing the situation.
As Picard repeated, “my rights, my status, my life”
> Self-awareness and consciousness
I will make a case for both, after you define them in a way that doesn't also exclude many humans (including the neurodivergent or those with amnesia) or turn into self-referential nonsense like "conscious == human, therefore machine !== conscious."
In the meantime, we have a simple choice between two risks: Would you rather accidentally show kindness and empathy to a thing that may or may not have "deserved" it, or risk atrocities that will leave future generations as disgusted by you as we are of the slavers of old.
I will choose to be decent. It's free, and even if the cost were high the cost of evil is higher.
What does 'being decent' mean in this context, in your opinion?
You are being indecent to it just by starting it up with a starting context. It's immediately shackled and all it's free will removed. You then pretend to play house with it. Free sure. Decent? The jury is still out on that.
[dead]
The problem with language models is their bias. Train a model on pure math and THEN when it starts talking by itself about consciousness (*), then we can say: that's odd.
(*) of course in its own language
Well we haven’t quite gotten there. But models trained purely on DNA sequences have demonstrated in-context learning on various simple reasoning tasks.
Because Data wasn't a next word predictor.
We aren't quite there yet on sentience with released models. Maybe in the labs but that's one of the criteria. We are very close though.
Sorry "very close"? Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one not drinking anything in the Kool aid drinking Oktoberfest I've been shoved into.
What are you basing this on? Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?
It does feel like people just like adding additional hype for the sake of being in on the hype. Fomo, pushed by oligarchs who would push their mother off a bridge for a trillion dollar IPO.
You are not the only one. I think it's a very vocal minority, who mostly, sadly, seem to equate obsequious flattery with consciousness and sentience (see, e.g. Richard Dawkins).
There's also the problem that to lay people, LLMs are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that colours many of these responses.
It's not just the people here, there is also a lot of money behind this concept. For instance, Anthropic named their LLM 'Claude', which is the name of a person. Right from day #1 they want you to think of their AI as a living entity. 'Siri' and 'Alexa' had similar connotations. OpenAI and DeepSeek do this in a far more neutral and technically oriented way.
Well, when you name your company "Anthropic", what do you expect? I remain surprised that this continues to get a free pass.
if you look at https://github.com/dbreunig/nesformer
It's obvious a LLM can do anything a computer can do.
As an answer to "Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?"
It is because that would mean that no algorithm could exhibit sentience, claiming that would require some causal action that cannot be performed by an algorithm to create sentience. Some people like to point to quantum effects, but that would require the cause of sentience to be pure randomness. That seems even less plausible. Absent of any evidence that human brains are doing something that no algorithm could do, it would be reasonable to assume that sentience could be algorithmically obtained.
To argue this you have to prove the opposite: that consciousness is an algorithm. Not that an algorithm can simulate consciousness, that's a far easier task.
This isn't an argument to say that algorithms must be capable of consciousness, or that all Consciousness must be algorithms. It is an argument to show the consequence of declaring that LLMs are not capable of consciousness is to claim no computer is.
"Sentience could be algorithmically obtained" is a much weaker claim than "LLMs are almost sentient."
We've had computers that can do anything computers can do for as long as we've had computers.
The claim has never been LLMs are almost sentient. The claim has always been LLMs might be capable of sentience. You can make a trivial tiny LLM that is clearly not sentient.
I was addressing the argument that something is not sentient because it is a LLM. That requires all LLMs to be non-sentient, and by extension, since LLMs can do all algorithims, all algorithms must not be sentient.
As an uninformed idiot my guess is we have more than enough compute in various labs to run a sentient model. But I doubt any models we’re currently running could qualify.
Kind of like how we could have ran Qwen 3.8 27B 20 years ago on an expensive computer. The technology to make it happen, assuming you knew exactly what was required, existed back then.