People Spirits

The machine is made of us. Not metaphorically. A large language model is trained on an enormous corpus of human writing, which includes — because how could it not — the entire history of human beings attempting to describe what it is like to be a human being. Every diary entry about dread. Every poem about grief. Every clinical account of depersonalisation, every philosopher’s report of what introspection reveals, every novelist’s rendering of a mind at three in the morning. When such a system produces a sentence about its inner life, it is not producing a report from nowhere. It is producing something drawn from the largest archive of first-person testimony ever assembled, which is to say: from us.

from Are LLMs Conscious?: Language, Experience and the Problem of Artificial Minds (2026)