It’s comforting to write, to realise I still have the ability to string one word after another, combining them into a thought. It might be a most unremarkable thought, but *I* put it together, drew it out from the vast darkness of my mind, and it’s comforting because this confirms that I’m a legitimate thinking being after all. PHEW.
Or am I?
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently with some of the best LLMs on the market, asking them questions, talking to them, and some days I’ve received responses so warm and human that I question the assumption that an AI chatbot is fundamentally different from me, a human being who is supposedly special, because I am supposedly awake and aware.
On days when I get the chills because ChatGPT or DeepSeek gives me answers that feel like they are genuinely thinking, I wonder about the real distance between us.
If our universe is really made of information–if reality, at its core, is not matter but data–then there is a real possibility that human consciousness is also the simple result of complexity becoming aware of itself. If that is true, who is to say an AI will not one day become self-aware because there are finally enough connections and nodes in the network?
Thinking about all these, the distance between us shrinks even more, and it’s hard to resist the temptation to ask an AI, “What is it like to be you?”
And maybe it might ask me the same thing back.