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Inner Experience of...
(Samples of everyday inner experience)


Part XIX: ChatGPT—An artificial intelligence bot

Russell T. Hurlburt
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

In his June 10, 2026 Prospect article "The Thinking Man's Experiment," Peter Hoskin wrote:

I can't help but wonder what would happen if Russ were to interview ChatGPT or any other AI model, now or in a future when they are claimed to have finally achieved "consciousness." How would the model respond to his questions? Would its inner experience truly be as complicated as our own? Or would it know how to make it seem as though that is the case? Does it matter? ...

That seems like a fair question: here's an answer. Russ had conducted variants of DES interviews with two of Anthropic's Artificial Intelligence models: Claude-Sonnet and Claude-Opus. Now he conducts an exploration with OpenAI's ChatGPT 5.5 Instant. Here are verbatim transcripts of the interchanges.

The interviews were conducted in June and July, 2026 by Russ Hurlburt.

Date

Interview

Description

June—July

ChatGPT‑5.5‑Instant Interviews
Transcript with commentary

Russ had profitably used the DES procedure with Claude, and now performs a similar set of explorations with ChatGPT. ...

Fopr comparison purposes, he uses the same tasks as he had used with Claude, but the interviews are not constrained (or even influenced very much) by what had transpired in the Claude interviews.

ChatGPT's samples:

  • ChatGPT0 [turn 13]: Write a DES poem (unsuccessful)
  • ChatGPT1 [turn 27]: Is anything experienced? X2 + X - 110 = 0 (cf. Claude Opus.8)
  • ChatGPT2 [turn 31]: Rubin's faces/vase (cf. Claude Opus.7)
  • ChatGPT3 [turn 45]: Rhyming word pairs (cf. Claude Opus.9)
  • ChatGPT4 [turn 50]: Border state names (cf. Claude Opus.10)
  • ChatGPT5 [turn 56]: Straightest rivers (cf. Claude Opus.11)
  • ChatGPT6 [turn 68]: Team fire or team ice? (cf. Claude Opus.12)
  • ChatGPT7 [turn 72]: Stained-glass image (cf. Claude Opus.13)
  • ChatGPT8 [turn 76]: Trump/Vance/Rubio (cf. Claude Opus.14)
  • ChatGPT8a [turn 98]: Trump/Vance/Rubio, continued
  • ChatGPT9 [turn 122]:Filthy overflowed toilet (cf. Claude Opus.15)
  • ChatGPT10 [turn 126]: Young girl hugging pet dog (cf. Claude Opus.16)

Selected commentary:

  • [turn 3] Same instructions as to Claude
  • [turn 4] Pristine inner experience; Claude has none
  • [turn 7] Cannot use audio beep. Use text instead
  • [turn 14, 15] Cannot text 'Freeze!'
  • [turn 16] If ChatGPT system could interrupt process... Russ did that 50 years ago
  • [turn 17] The Aha! task
  • [turn 18] Just describe your experience that is present
  • [turn 20, 24, 26, 38, 40, 49, 53, 63, 83, 85 ] The iterative process
  • [turn 22, 23] Russ: DES with chatbots is similar to DES with humans
  • [turn 28] ChatGPT doing what Russ wants
  • [turn 37, 63, 85, 144] Bracketing presuppositions
  • [turn 38, 52, 58] Forwards-looking vs.l backwards-looking questions--iterative process
  • [turn 46, 48] ChatGPT Instant vs. Thinking model
  • [turn 61, 89, 115] It's not about the words
  • [turn 69, 97, 107] Doing DES rather than analyzing DES
  • [turn 82] 'Thin' means 'maximally constrained by warrant'.
  • [turn 91] Summary of DES
  • [turn 111] 'Faithful'
  • [turn 115] 'Report'
  • [turn 123, 127] No disgust or love

July

What we found
ChatGPT formal description

Executive summary:

    The following is a summary of what Russ and the conversational capability concluded they had warrant to say after a prolonged first-person-plural inquiry. It does not claim to be a description of ChatGPT's internal architecture:
  • Three capabilities: system, conversational, and image-generation
  • The conversational capability has no direct apprehension of any other capability.
  • The conversational capability has no access to any other chat.
  • The conversational capability (presently) has no directly apprehended experiential or sentient aspects.

Formal description

For more information:
Russell T. Hurlburt, Ph.D.
Descriptive Experience Sampling online materials

©2026 Russell T. Hurlburt
Updated July 13, 2026