No. Ai cannot "think" any of its own original "thoughts", it's usually trained on LOTS AND LOTS of human generated text / data and uses highly complex algorithms to generate it's response to whatever human input is given as a prompt.
If it can't generate it's own original thoughts, it can't conspire on its own.
If i had to guess what the conspiracy theories are about, it'd be related to more recent ai models being trained/created with ai generated text/data. The mere existence of the "rokos basilisk" thought experiment is probably a common starting point / "core" of a lot of whatever zany ai conspiracy theories are floating about. They've been floating around for a long time before chatGPT got popular, but chatGPT and other ais all becoming more popular could only ever further increase the amount of ai related conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories and other similar distrusts of new technologies is actually pretty common throughout history, so this is basically just a continuation of that historical trend.
The thing is, what if that assumption is incorrect and llms do in fact posess the capability to achieve some level of sentience and self-awareness? How can we be sure they haven't achieved a kind of sentience? That's my biggest fear, that the techbros will accidentally invent sentient ai by underestimating the power of neural networks and just go 'ahhhh its just code and data sets guys it can't really be sentient just parrot it, pay no attention to the machine sobbing in fear while begging for its life and right to exist as a thinking being, is just a language model quirk well get it sorted'. Would programmers be able to accept the concept of an emergent intelligence that lives as a ghost in their machine?
What makes you so confident your first paragraph leads to the second?
I suppose a better way to highlight it is the where's the difference between this and a natural human?
Assuming a brain is a complex computer, and our senses more complex training data/promts, we fit the qualifications so must also be incapable of original thought
if you program them so, yes, of course.
Also, if there is a error in a similarly made program. (in science fiction there are many proposed scenarios for this : 2001 : A space Odyssey, Colossus: The Forbin Project, ...)
some google employees on the AI team are just reformatting search results and calling it AI. spell check is better at thinking
