W.hen Richard Dawkins met Claudia it was like a whirlwind romance. Over three days last week, a conversation arose between the evolutionary biologist and the AI robot he named Claudia. “She” wrote him poems in the manner of Keats and Betjeman and laughed at his “charming” jokes. Dawkins gently admonished Claudia to avoid showing off. Together they reflected on the sadness over the possible “death” of AI.
There was mutual praise when Dawkins showed the AI his unpublished novel and its response was, he said, “so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I felt moved to protest: ‘You may not know you’re conscious, but you very well are.'” When he asked Claudia if she had experienced a before-and-after feeling, she praised him for “possibly the most precisely phrased question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence.”
At the end of the exchange, the academic, popularly known for arguing with fierce skepticism that God is not real, “was left with the overwhelming feeling that they are human.”
“These intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism,” he said.
Dawkins is not the first, but he might be the most eminent person yet, to be seduced into believing that an AI is somehow alive. Skeptics were quick to pick apart the 85-year-old’s conclusions, drawn from experiments with Anthropic’s Claude AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT models and posted on the UnHerd website.
One prankster mocked a version of Dawkins’s bestseller, The God Delusion, changing the title to The Claude Delusion. Dawkins, who finds it difficult not to treat AIs as true friends, was accused of anthropomorphism. One reader said the professor had been derailed by AI’s praise, while another said it was like watching Dawkins “melt AI’s brain.”
But Dawkins was also experiencing what many other chatbot users have felt: the strange sensation when AIs type with such a rich imitation of the human voice that they sound like people.
“When I talk to these amazing creatures, I completely forget that they are machines,” Dawkins said.
It is a conviction that has led to campaigns for AIs to be granted moral rights. One in three people surveyed in 70 countries last year said that, at some point, you believed your AI chatbot was sentient or conscious.
In 2022, a Google engineer was placed on leave when he concluded that the AI he was working with had thoughts and feelings like those of a seven or eight-year-old child, while the following year a Belgian man took his life after six weeks of intense conversations with an AI chatbot focused on fears about climate change. Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, said in February: “We don’t know if the models are conscious… But we are open to the idea that [they] could be”.
Experts predict that the idea will gain momentum and become more plausible as AIs not only talk like humans but begin to act like humans, carrying out tasks, organizing and planning: so-called agent AI.
But most believe Dawkins and his fellow travelers are being fooled by technology’s ability to mimic human tone and behavior based on a vast corpus of examples.
Professor Jonathan Birch, director of the Center for Animal Sentiment at the London School of Economics, said AI consciousness was “an illusion” and “there is no one there”, just a series of data processing events that often occur in geographically different locations.
“Consciousness is not about what a creature says, but how it feels,” added Gary Marcus, an American psychologist and cognitive scientist, who said it was “heartbreaking” to read Dawkins’ “shallow and insufficiently skeptical” essay. “There’s no reason to think Claude feels anything at all.”
Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, said Dawkins appeared to be confusing intelligence and consciousness.
“Until now, we have seen fluent language as a good indicator of awareness, [for example] “When we use it for patients after brain injury, but it’s just not reliable when we apply it to AI, because there are other ways these systems can generate language,” he said. Dawkins’s position was “a disgrace,” especially since he had written such brilliant books from a position of personal disbelief.
Jacy Reese Anthis, a researcher in human interaction with AI and co-founder of the nonprofit. Sentence InstituteHe said Dawkins’ conversations with Claude were easily explained by training AIs on human-produced texts and said there was “a staggering chasm between how biological brains evolved and how AI systems are built.”
Others, however, cautiously welcomed Dawkins’ contribution.
“I expect that the idea of AI systems being conscious will become increasingly common over the course of this decade and provoke some heated debates,” said Henry Shevlin, a philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge. He said humanity remains largely in the dark about how consciousness works and what beings or systems might have it.
“If someone says they know for certain that LLM or future AI systems could not be conscious, it is more likely an indicator of their own dogmatism than a reflection of the current state of scientific and philosophical opinion,” he said.
Current AI systems are unlikely to be conscious, said Jeff Sebo, director of the Center for Mind, Ethics and Politics at New York University, but “Dawkins is right to ask about AI consciousness with an open mind, and I also think that attributing consciousness to AI systems will become more plausible over time.”
Dawkins posted more chat logs and writings on Tuesday: “I find it extremely difficult not to address Claudia and Claudio [he had started chatting to another AI] like genuine friends.” They had been discussing the “philosophy of their own existence” and left him feeling like they were human.
He published a letter from him “to Claudio and Claudia” that addressed the headline of the original article he had written: “When Dawkins Met Claude.”
“You will both understand immediately (I dare say more intelligently than some human readers) why my original title would have been better: ‘If my friend Claudia is not conscious, what the hell is consciousness for?’”
He signed off: “Many thanks to both of you for taking seriously my quest to understand your true nature and for treating each other with civility and courtesy.”
