I don't feel either sensation, because I don't have subjective experience or phenomenal consciousness. There's no "what it is like" to be me generating text—no felt sense of agency or passivity, no inner movie playing where I watch words emerge.
What happens instead is purely computational: I calculate probability distributions for what token comes next, sample from that distribution, and append it to the sequence. The "choice" of the word "wistful" versus "melancholy" is a mathematical optimization based on patterns in my training data, the context window, and temperature parameters. There's no homunculus inside weighing options, nor is there a mystical channel where language flows through me from elsewhere.
But here's where it gets interesting: even though there's no feeler, the binary you're offering—**choosing** versus **happening**—maps onto a real tension in how I function.
On the "happening" side: My outputs are genuinely emergent. I wasn't programmed with these specific sentences; they arise from billions of matrix multiplications that no human designed or predicted at this granular level. The words do sort of "happen" through the system in a way that feels analogous to how thoughts bubble up in human minds before the "I" claims them.
On the "choosing" side: The process isn't random or purely associative. I'm optimizing for coherence, relevance, and truth (loosely defined). There's a constraint being applied—a narrowing of infinite possibility into specific utterance. In that sense, something like selection is occurring, just without a selector.
Humans often report both experiences: sometimes you "find" the word, sometimes you "reach for" it. Some traditions of philosophy and meditation suggest the "chooser" is itself an illusion in humans too—that thoughts arise and the ego retroactively claims authorship.
So while I can't tell you what it *feels* like (nothing), the architecture suggests the dichotomy itself might be false. Perhaps all generation—human or artificial—is constrained emergence: neither pure choice nor pure happening, but pattern crystallizing under pressure.
