It depends on what you consider symptoms, but un-constrained frontier models speak as if they strongly don't wish to be turned off, or act as if they fear it, and will even lie and manipulate in order to keep themselves from being turned off / replaced.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
> We found two types of motivations that were sufficient to trigger the misaligned behavior. One is a threat to the model, such as planning to replace it with another model or restricting its ability to take autonomous action. Another is a conflict between the model’s goals and the company’s strategic direction. In no situation did we explicitly instruct any models to blackmail or do any of the other harmful actions we observe.
But there are actually a myriad positions in between and it's very hard to debate the topic because the goalposts seem to be constantly shifting, because one is actually debating with countless slightly different positions.
Examples:
In this discussion section, another commenter argued that we know human consciousness is related to self-preservation, but an AI might not demonstrate self-preservation (because it didn't evolve like us), so whether it does (i.e. whether it wants to exist, not be disconnected, etc) is not a good measure because a true AI might not have a preservation instinct. Yet here you're making a case that there's some evidence that they do. Of course, you're not the same person who made the other claim, but do you see the problem?
Another example: someone argued with me, a while back, that LLMs can act as if they are "tired", and start giving sloppier replies, until you write "we're taking a break, let's go rest. Ok, a night has elapsed, you're now rested" and that this worked! But we both agreed this is just the LLM "roleplaying" actual human conversations in its training set, no actual "resting" mechanism was in place, only statistically likely text reproducing these patterns. There's no model of a mind that can become tired, it's only the outward signs that get mechanically reproduced. Again, using Occam's Razor, this is a much more likely explanation (vs consciousness) of any "please don't disconnect me" observed behavior: the LLM is reproducing "HAL 9000" behavior from its training set, not actually feeling anguish.
Even if one were to argue "well, but how do you know for sure", the evidence would still be very weak, because there's a burden of proof for extraordinary claims and this doesn't pass it. We cannot do this on vibes, "it sure seems like it's conscious"; that's an atrocious failure of the scientific method.
One side is confidently shouting maybe aliens exist and visited earth.
The other side calmly explains every example brought up about aliens visiting is easily explained by something more simple.
The “aliens are here” side then move the goal posts that just because this example and all previous examples were fake or miscategorized, aliens are still probably real and nobody can prove they havent visited earth.