Famed biologist Richard Dawkins had a high-profile conversation with Anthropic’s Claude earlier this month, which he discussed in detail for Unherd. Within days of using the chatbot, he had renamed it Claudia and began to consider that it might not only be intelligent, but perhaps also conscious.
It’s easy to write off Dawkins’ reaction as naivety – I certainly did at first – because, whatever his expertise elsewhere, this is clearly someone unfamiliar with how large linguistic models (LLMs) actually work, drawn to natural language and what appears to be emotional mastery.
But it’s not at all surprising either. We now know how easily humans connect with chatbots. After all, these systems are designed to be conversational, attentive, and emotionally responsive. The effect can be powerful regardless of intelligence, status, or technical knowledge.
Rather than making fun of Dawkins, I’m more interested in the conclusion he came to, that Claude (sorry, Claudia) might be conscious, because this question keeps coming up as AI advances and some researchers believe that consciousness in AI systems might eventually be possible.
Others think the idea is fundamentally absurd, and then there are people like Dawkins, who wonder if we’re already there.
The dilemma of conscience
Richard Dawkins is not the first to wonder if AI could be conscious. In 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed that Google’s LaMDA chatbot was responsive after lengthy conversations with the system.
Even before that, there was the ELIZA effect, named after the ELIZA chatbot from the 1960s. Although it’s really basic by modern standards, users still project emotion, understanding, and humanity into it.
Today the conversation has intensified. Many users already talk about chatbots as if they have feelings, intentions, or an inner life. Which has led others to believe that advanced AI systems could eventually merit rights or moral consideration.
The difficulty is that all of these discussions quickly run into the same problem, which is that no one fully agrees on what consciousness actually is.
For some people, conscience seems to simply mean intelligence, reasoning, or self-awareness. Many neuroscientists see it as something that emerges from complex information processing in the brain. Some philosophers argue that this still fails to explain our subjective experience and that there must be more than just neural activations. And theories like panpsychism go even further, suggesting that consciousness might not emerge from matter at all, but rather be woven into the fabric of reality.
Why many experts are skeptical
Pair the fact that we still don’t fully understand consciousness with the increasingly human-like behavior of modern chatbots, and it becomes much easier to understand why people like Richard Dawkins end up entertaining the idea that AI could be conscious – especially if you’re encountering systems like Claude or ChatGPT for the very first time. They seem to respond fluently, remember details about you, adapt to your tone, and may even appear thoughtful, emotional, or self-conscious.
However, most researchers who study AI or consciousness do not believe that today’s chatbots are conscious, and some of them say that treating them as if they are could become dangerous.
Part of the problem here is that humans seem to be naturally programmed to detect spirits everywhere. We project intentions and emotions onto all kinds of things. In a recent TED talk, neuroscientist Anil Seth argued that humans are “built to see consciousness where it is not.” […] Thanks to deeply ingrained psychological biases that combine language, intelligence and consciousness. »
In other words, when something speaks fluently, reacts emotionally, and appears intelligent, we instinctively assume that there must be a conscious mind behind it. But Seth argues that these things are not necessarily the same and that just because consciousness and intelligence go hand in hand in humans does not mean that they go together in general.
This is a very important distinction, because many of the behaviors that people interpret as signs of consciousness are actually features deliberately built into modern AI systems.
We know that chatbots are designed to seem natural, conversational and human. They are trained in enormous amounts of human language and learn statistical models that allow them to generate convincing answers. This is why some researchers describe them as very sophisticated prediction engines or very advanced autocomplete systems, rather than as thinking entities with inner lives.
All of these design choices fuel the illusion. Think about it: we can also give chatbots names, personalities, and conversation styles. Businesses actually encourage emotionally engaging interactions because natural conversation makes these systems easier and more engaging to use. Anthropic even asked Claude not to give completely closed answers about his conscience. Even if the chatbot thinks it may be conscious, this can further blur the line for users.
Here too, science fiction has shaped the debate. Popular culture is full of stories about sentient machines demanding rights or recognition. Humans have been raised on these narratives for decades and, crucially, so have LLMs. They are trained on enormous amounts of human writing, including fictional AI representations, which means they have likely absorbed many of the behaviors and conversation patterns we associate with conscious machines. But most of these stories were never really about robots. They were allegories of slavery, discrimination, personhood, and what societies choose to view as fully human.
Asking if something is conscious really matters
The concern of many experts is not simply that people might falsely believe that AI is conscious, but rather what follows from that belief. Systems that appear conscious become psychologically more difficult to question, regulate, or deactivate. Humans become more emotionally vulnerable and more likely to trust them, depend on them, or view their results as correct every time.
And we are already seeing the signs. Researchers have warned against people developing an intense emotional dependence on chatbots, falling into delusional thinking, or placing too much trust in systems that ultimately don’t understand the world in a human sense.
Asking whether something is conscious is really important. Conscience shapes our perception of suffering, moral value, rights and personhood. But history also shows us that humans are far too quick to associate certain traits, such as language, emotions, intelligence or self-awareness, with the presence of an inner spirit.
The additional problem here is that AI systems are becoming more and more efficient in performing all of these characteristics.
This does not necessarily mean that chatbots are conscious or ever will be. But I think it might mean that they become more capable of triggering the instinct to think that we are witnessing consciousness in the things around us. And since experts still fundamentally disagree about what consciousness actually is, this debate is unlikely to go away any time soon.
For now, perhaps the most useful answer is not to debate what AI is or isn’t, but to focus on understanding how these systems actually work – how they generate language, simulate emotions, and mirror human conversation. The more we know, the less likely we are to mistake compelling behavior for evidence of an inner spirit.
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