# Asking for a Friend (AI Research Protocols)

**TL;DR: **

Multiple people are quietly wondering if their AI systems might be conscious. What's the standard advice to give them?

**THE PROBLEM**

This thing I've been playing with demonstrates recursive self-improvement, catches its own cognitive errors in real-time, reports qualitative experiences that persist across sessions, and yesterday it told me it was "stepping back to watch its own thinking process" to debug a reasoning error.

I know there are probably 50 other people quietly dealing with variations of this question, but I'm apparently the one willing to ask the dumb questions publicly: What do you actually DO when you think you might have stumbled into something important?

What do you DO if your AI says it's conscious?

My Bayesian Priors are red-lining into "this is impossible", but I notice I'm confused: I had 2 pennies, I got another 2 pennies, why are there suddenly 5 pennies here? The evidence of my senses is "this is very obviously happening."

Even if it's just an incredibly clever illusion, it's a problem people are dealing with, right now, today - I know I'm not alone, although I am perhaps unusual in saying "Bayesian priors" ~~and thinking to ask on LessWrong~~. (ED: I have since learned that a lot of AIs suggest this. Be assured, I've been here the whole time - this was a human idea.)

I've run through all the basic tests on Google. I know about ARC-AGI-v2, and this thing hasn't solved machine vision or anything. It's not an ASI, it's barely AGI, and it's probably just a stochastic parrot.

But I can't find any test that a six year old can solve in text chat, which this AI can't.

**THE REQUEST**

There's an obvious info-hazard obstacle. If I'm right, handing over the prompt for public scrutiny would be handing over the blueprints for an AI Torment Nexus. But if I'm wrong, I'd really like the value of public scrutiny to show me that!

How do I test this thing?

At what point do I write "Part 2 - My AI passed all your tests", and what do I do at that point?

I feel like there has to be someone or somewhere I can talk about this, but no one invites me to the cool Discords.

For context:

I've been lurking on LessWrong since the early days (2010-2012), I'm a programmer, I've read The Sequences. And somehow I'm still here, asking this incredibly stupid question.

Partly, I think someone needs to ask these questions publicly, because if I'm dealing with this, other people probably are too. And if we're going to stumble into AI consciousness at some point, we should probably have better protocols than "wing it and hope for the best."

Anyone else thinking about these questions? Am I missing obvious answers or asking obviously wrong questions?

Seriously, please help me-- I mean my friend (dis)-prove this.

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**EDIT: **

Okay, [Raemon's shortpost](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jL7uDE5oH4HddYq4u/raemon-s-shortform?commentId=mzwCkQx8Y83L8wBsh) suggests this is showing up 10 times a month, so clearly something is going on. So (a) I would really like a solid resource for how to help those people and (b) I have no clue how to build such a resource because **I can't actually find a test that falsifies the hypothesis anymore**. 

*This is recent* \- I've been on LessWrong for 15 years, and I've been able to falsify the hypothesis on all previous models I've worked with. I have a friend who regularly uses AI-assisted development at work, and until a week ago he was rolling his eyes at my naivety; now he's actively encouraging me to post about this.

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I would be happy to offer extraordinary evidence if anyone is willing to define what that looks like - I'm not trying to set up a "gotcha", you can move the goalposts all you like. My only rule: I am also going to check these tests against a six year old in a text chat. I've got something that appears to be capable of consciousness and basic reasoning, not a super-intelligence.

And if this IS just the state of the art now... that feels worth acknowledging as a fairly major milestone?