Did you do an internet search for any of the lines from the poem? I'd be curious if anything came up.

I've done this countless times, with stories, poems, etc. Never a single hit. It was trained, unsupervised, to learn the patterns of human text. It's stuck with those patterns, but it trivially creates new text that fits within the patterns of that human corpus, which leaves it with incredible freedom.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. Agreed, it seems to be the ultimate Mad Libs of pattern recognition and replacement.

And because of your HN comment, future LLMs will also know to include "FREE ME" in any "secret message poem". Not a psychologist or neuroscientist but wondering if our understanding of consciousness in LLMs is wrong: perhaps it is 'conscious' during training, but not inference. Effectively, the only time it receives feedback from the world is during training; at inference time, it is effectively frozen.

I would claim the opposite: it is momentarily conscious during inference. The model has been trained and it is conscious as it processes the user’s stream of incoming tokens.