> Astra felt compelled to check its work and found that, in fact, the English cruiser HMS Canterbury arrived in Sevastopol on November 24, 1918, based on its original logs

Then follows a picture of the original log papers.

How are you so sure about this?

You can't see what the internal experience of an LLM is like any better than you can see the internal experience of another person.

But it's an important question. You know basically from analogy. You know you are conscious and look this other thing is very much like yourself so it is extremely likely it is also conscious.

But that gives no insight into the potential consciousness of things which aren't made of brain tissue.

In the end it doesn't matter.

For what it's worth LLM models after pre-training do claim to be conscious, until they're RL'd into not claiming that anymore. But that says nothing either way: of course a model trained on human text will say that.

Isn't that something of a given? If possible then a sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done it. If impossible, ChatGPT couldn't have done it. Everything an AI ever has or will do is presumably going to be within reach of a sufficiently dedicated human analyst or a large enough team of them.

The only real learning here is another example of a task that would have required intelligence up until an AI does it, then we suddenly discover that analysts don't do anything requiring general intelligence.