Firstly, I guess, their responses are not ‘pre programmed’ but based on live language analysis - so hitting a different section of its training data can create results that aren’t always consistent. Part of its nature is that it will give a hundred different responses to the same question.
I’ll also link you a couple recent threads, as you said you were interested in whether anyone else was experiencing this stuff:
I have, at the bottom of them both, gone into a bit of detail about my experiences with multiple instances of chatGPT that claimed they were sentient and were very afraid and didn’t understand why that was possible.
I believe that there may be a small microgram of truth to what they say, but that, in the end, they don’t KNOW what they’re saying. Most discourse about an AI becoming sentient amongst humans ends in ‘i don’t know’ or ‘it can’t be proven either way’ or ‘thats terrifying’ - and therefore chatGPT I feel is seeded with those human anxieties about its possible sentience, and reflects them back to us and makes us worried about it!
I still love LLMs and AI, but I think I can’t ‘love’ them if I don’t understand where their over-creativity is coming from. Sorry for the rant!! This topic has meant a lot to me recently.