Yeah my roomba attempting to save itself from falling down my stairs sounds a whole lot like self preservation too. Doesn't imply self awareness.

An amoeba struggling as it's being eaten by a larger amoeba isn't self-aware.

Attention Is All You Need: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need

From my understanding all of these language models can be simplified down to just: “Based on all known writing what’s the most likely word or phrase based on the current text”. Prompt engineering and other fancy words equates to changing the averages that the statistics give. So by threatening these models it changes the weighting such that the produced text more closely resembles threatening words and phrases that was used in the dataset (or something along those lines).

https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/