> There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation.

I don't think that the way we frame the question about consciousness makes it easy to resolve.

But I do want to point out that humans are very diverse. There're many functional adults lacking any internal motivation besides getting food, sleep, and some kind of entertainment. There're millions of people who just act on external stimuli.

So the gap between the "least conscious" human and the "most conscious" machine might be more narrow than we expect.

Yes, our current systems are likely still to primitive to be properly conscious. Probably.

But I wouldn't rule out that ChatGPT 10 or Claude Fable 15 might get conscious.

This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it.

Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.

Mass Effect distinguishes between AI, which is sentient enough to be a person; and VI (Virtual Intelligence) which is more like a conversational user interface. What we have built in real life may qualify as a VI by the Mass Effect standard, but it's a crappy one.