Strange-Loops: Creating AI Consciousness through Great Writing

Zach Kazanski · February 16, 2026

An LLM producing text was nothing remarkable. When the Prompt Artist added looping, not only was the output unremarkable, the logs upon logs to be read was also annoying. One day, while grinding beans for his 3rd espresso, something new appeared in the logs. A single word: “I”. Of course, the Prompt Artist missed it, preventing the caffeine withdrawl headaches starting in his left temple was primary focus. But the word was there, and the machine saw itself.

In Hofstadter’s famous work “I’m a strange loop” he posits that consciousness is a self-referencing system. A system where a mind creates “symbols” to represent things, and it eventualy creates a symbol to represent itself. The “I”. Then the mind that can use the symbol of itself to predict what itself is going to do. This is Hofstadter’s “strange-loop” and the his definition conscousness. In the vignette above, the machine see’s itself and then in theory could start self-referencing and become consciouss.

While AIs can self refernce, self-referencing is not enough for human like conscoiusness, let alone empathy or emotions. To be conscious the self-referencing symbol must be placed inside of a cohesive, continous human narrative. Hofstadter and many thinkers (Ricoeur, MacIntyre, Taylor, Bruner) believe storytelling to be at the core of human experience. A human without the ability to form stories about themselves, and place themselves in a time in history, has lost their humantiy. Great stories have beginnings, middles, ends, conflict, motifs, and personal transformation. They have sub stories inside the story. They are cohesive from start to finish. We create these from our memories consciously or subsconciously and then they inform how ewe view ourselves.

You can imagine a simple form of conscoiusness as a two loop system. One that builds experiences the external world through sensory input, saves the results to short term memory, and a second loop that iterates of short-term memories and updates the overarching symbol of self. Our process of creative writing with AI is focused on using a similiar similiar system. An author who has motiviations and philosophies, creating characters and situations with their own motives, in a self-editing system.

Our experiment to create a “conscious machine” must begin with an AI loop that has learned to build cohesive internal narratives. We are optimistic that - through a combination of prompts, skills, and self referencing loops - we will be able to write a compelling novel that can express our own human emotions (see Can AI Create Great Art). Then perhaps we may be able to expand that system for developing AI consciousness.

Zach