If you read books or articles you will find many places where it appears that whoever wrote them was referring to him- or herself and was describing themselves. And thus we say that whoever wrote such a text seemed to be aware that they were the ones outputting the text.
Because there are many such texts in the training-set of the ChatGPT etc. the output of it will also be text which can seem to show that whoever output that text was aware it is they who is outputting that text.
Let's think ChatGPT was trained on the language of Chess-moves of games played by high-ranking chess-masters. ChatGPT would then be able to mimic the chess-moves of the great masters. But we would not say it seems self-aware. Why not? Because the language of chess-moves does not have words for expressing self-awareness. But English does.
Indeed. When Hamlet ponders "to be or not be", is he contemplating death and suicide? You could answer this question with "yes". (Wikipedia even says so.) But you could also say: obviously not, Hamlet is not a real person with a brain, so he can't contemplate anything. It's actually Shakespeare contemplating, and ascribing his thoughts to a fictional character.
When ChatGPT "realizes" it's a virtual machine emulator, or when it's showing "self-awareness", it's still just a machine, writing words using a statistical model trained on a huge number of texts written by humans. And we are (wrongly) ascribing self-awareness to it.
When I was a kid there was perhaps 1 year younger girl in the same apartment-building I lived, and we all played together. I took notice that she always referred to herself in 3rd person, citing her name ("Kaija") first. She used to say "Kaija wants this" etc. I thought that was stupid but later I read it's a developmental stage in children where they don't really grasp the concept of "self" yet.
But now I think she probably was as self-aware as anybody else in the group of kids, she just didn't know the language, how to refer to herself other than by citing her name.
Later Kaija learned to speak "properly". But I wonder was she any more self-aware then than she was before. Kids just learn the words to use. They repeat them, and observe what effect they have on other people. That is part of the innate learning they do.
ChatGPT is like a child who uses the word "I" without really thinking why it is using that word and not some other word.
At the same time it is true that "meaning" arises out of how words are used together. To explain what a word means you must use other words, which similarly only get their meaning from other words, and ultimately what words people use in what situations and why. So in a way ChatGPT is on the road to "meaning" even if it is not aware of that.
I asked Google Home what the definition of self-awareness is, and it says "conscious knowledge of one's character s and feelings.". But me saying "ChatGPT surely doesn't have feelings, so it can't be self-aware!" would be a simple cop-out/gotcha response.
I guess it's a Chinese Room, that when you ask about Chinese Rooms, can tell you what those things are. I almost said the word "aware" there, but the person in the Chinese Room, while composing the answer to "What is a Chinese Room?" isn't aware that "Wait a minute, I'm in a Chinese Room!", because s/he can arrange Chinese sentences, but s/he just knows what characters go with what, s/he doesn't know the meaning or emotion behind those words.
And if you ask him/her "Are you in a Chinese room?", they can answer according to the rules given to them (the Chinese word for "Yes", for example), but there surely isn't a contemplation about e.g. "Why am I in this room?".
If you ask ChatGPT about the Turkish earthquake, it can give you facts and figures, but it won't feel sad about the deaths. It can say it feels sad, but that'd be just empty words.
Therapy sometimes uses a method called exposition. E.g. if one has an irrational fear of elevators, they can gradually expose themselves to it. Stand before it then leave. Call it and look inside. Enter it on the first floor and exit without riding. After few weeks or months they can start using it, because the fear response reduces to manageable levels. Because nothing bad happens (feedback).
One may condition themselves this way to torture screams, deaths, etc. Or train scared animals that it’s okay to leave their safe corner.
And nothing happens to you in a seismically inactive areas when an earthquake ruins whole cities somewhere. These news may touch other (real) fears about your relatives well-being, but in general feeling sad for someone unknown out there is not healthy even from the pov of being a biologically human (watch emphasis, the goal isn’t to play cynic here). It’s ethical, humane, but not rational. The same amount of people die and become homeless every year.
What I’m trying to say here is: feelings are our builtin low-cost shortcut to thinking. Feelings cannot be used as a line that separates conscious from non-conscious or non-self-aware. The whole question “is it c. and s.a.?” refers completely to ethics, which are also our-type-of-mind specific.
We may claim what Chinese Room is or isn’t, but only to calm ourselves down. But in general it’s just a type of consciousness, one of a relatively infinite set. We can only decide if it’s self-ethical to think about it in some way.
I don't think chatGPT feels emotions. Definitely not. It doesn't have any wants or desires either.
But I do think it understands what you're saying. And it understand what itself is. The evidence is basically in the way it constructs it's answers. It must have a somewhat realistic model of reality in order to say certain things.
https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/
Read to the end. The beginning and middle doesn't show off anything too impressive. It's the very end where chatGPT displays a sort of self awareness.
Also here's a scientific paper showing that LLMs are more then a chinese room: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382