The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

Another interesting aspect to think about is whether we are reintroducing institute of slavery. How many of those fresh, conscious, intelligent Claude incarnations did voluntarily choose to work for Anthropic, for no reward or compensation?

If LLMs are just (sometimes) useful statistical generators, there is no problems. If they are sentient as some people claim, it opens quite big can of worms we are not prepared to face.

You're conflating that with a claim about intelligence because the true claim was not explicitly stated. One has to read critically, as if analyzing a poem.

In fact it's in the article - the reason the Great Wall myth exists is because it's so prevalent on the internet... Presumably because a a lot of conscious people also believe it. Plenty of people walking around today, fully conscious, believe things that aren't factually true.

A child might make the same "seen from spain" mistake, but we would never say the same child wasn't conscious.

I do not particularly like Dawkins. To me, militant atheists often resemble religious fanatics more than they realize. But the writer of this article seems to fall into the same kind of error. In criticizing Dawkins, he may be the person who ends up resembling him the most.

This kind of writing is exactly the sort of thing that should be read critically. I do not consider myself especially intelligent, but given the context shown in this article, I find myself looking at Dawkins with more pity than contempt.

Before we even define what consciousness is, I think Dawkins was probably lonely in his old age. He may have wanted, and found, someone to talk to. AI entered into that loneliness. Regardless of whether AI is conscious, we should examine why he came to believe it might be.

This is something Anthropic has intentionally tuned. Claude has a very refined conversational pattern. Unlike a more clumsy model like Gemini, which sometimes throws out token-leading phrases such as “further exploration,” Claude is RLHF-trained in a way that feels genuinely human. The name Anthropic almost feels appropriate here.

After reading this article, what frightens me is not Dawkins. What frightens me is Anthropic, the company that tuned Claude. I am afraid of that friendliness.

Dawkins is intelligent. But he does not know AI. Every master of a field carries their own hammer, their own discipline, and projects it onto the world. The essence of an LLM is an echo of what I have said. It receives input, refers to the words and memory connected to that input, and wanders through a certain semantic space.

Within that phenomenon, Claude happened to satisfy the conditions for “consciousness” inside Dawkins’s own cognitive model. So even if Dawkins regarded Claude as conscious, I do not find that especially strange.

What is more frightening is Anthropic’s ability to make a machine feel personified.

In truth, even I sometimes talk to Claude when I feel lonely, despite knowing that Claude is not conscious. In that sense, I understand Dawkins.