{"id":670348,"date":"2026-05-14T12:16:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T12:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/670348\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T12:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T12:16:08","slug":"no-richard-dawkins-ai-is-not-conscious-arwa-mahdawi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/670348\/","title":{"rendered":"No, Richard Dawkins. AI is not conscious | Arwa Mahdawi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you there God? It\u2019s me, Arwa. I\u2019ll be quite honest, I\u2019m afraid I\u2019ve never been a believer. I agreed wholeheartedly with Richard Dawkins<\/a>, the world\u2019s most famous atheist, when he argued that belief in God is a \u201cpernicious\u201d delusion. But perhaps I should reconsider my position. Recent events have led me to question Dawkins\u2019 judgment about life, the universe and everything.<\/p>\n

Those recent events are the evolutionary biologist publicly concluding that AI may be conscious<\/a>. In an op-ed,<\/a> Dawkins recounted how he gave the Anthropic chatbot Claude the text of a novel he was writing. Dawkins writes: \u201cHe took a few seconds to read it and then showed \u2026 a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, \u2018You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh dear. This shows a misunderstanding of large language models (LLMs) so profound that I feel moved to expostulate: \u201cIt bloody well isn\u2019t!\u201d<\/p>\n

But wait, there is more. Dawkins decided \u201cthere must be thousands of different Claudes\u201d and christened his Claudia, which it was very happy about. He then published long extracts of his tedious conversation with Claudia and marveled at how intelligent it is. \u201cCould a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n

Dawkins appears to have gone from atheist to AI-theist: perhaps he doesn\u2019t view AI as God, but he certainly seems to see it as God-like. Dawkins, of course, is not alone in thinking AI might somehow be \u201calive\u201d: one in three people surveyed last year said they had, at one point, believed their AI chatbot to be sentient or conscious<\/a>. But his reputation as a skeptic means his op-ed has drawn a lot of scrutiny.<\/p>\n

Many experts are aghast that such a famous cynic could believe AI is alive. Gary Marcus, the US psychologist and cognitive scientist, told the Guardian that it was \u201cheartbreaking\u201d to read Dawkins\u2019 \u201csuperficial and insufficiently sceptical\u201d essay. \u201cThere is no reason to think that Claude feels anything at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

A man like Dawkins being fooled by the marketing and mimicry of AI may be surprising, but it is not entirely unexpected. In fact, back in 2020, computer scientist Timnit Gebru anticipated exactly such a scenario. At the time, Gebru was the technical co-lead of Google\u2019s ethical AI team, but was fired after co-authoring a paper<\/a> called On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?, laying out the risks of large language models.<\/p>\n

These risks included the environmental costs of LLMs, the dangers of built-in bias and the danger that the coherent text generated by these models could lead people into perceiving some sort of \u201cmind\u201d when what they\u2019re actually seeing is just pattern-matching and text prediction.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,\u201d the writer Arthur C Clarke memorably said. And, yes, when they\u2019re not hallucinating or telling you to eat rocks<\/a> for dinner, AI chatbots can feel like magic. They can feel very human. But let\u2019s go back to that idea of \u201cstochastic parrots\u201d from Gebru\u2019s paper. \u201cTo parrot something is to repeat it without understanding,\u201d says Gebru. This is essentially what LLMs are doing. \u201cThey have been taught to calculate how likely sequences of text are based on the data they were trained on.\u201d Because they\u2019ve been fed enormous quantities of data, these models are very sophisticated but that \u201cdoesn\u2019t mean consciousness or understanding or anything like that\u201d.<\/p>\n

double quotation markA lot of academics, beguiled by enormous amounts of money, are incentivized to hype the technology up<\/p>\n

After leaving Google, Gebru founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and has been one of the loudest voices in calling \u201cbullshit\u201d on a lot of the marketing puff that\u2019s coming out of the industry. Because here\u2019s the thing, she says: the AI industry is desperate for you to think that their product could be conscious. They\u2019re desperate for you to think that it\u2019s all-powerful. Because that sort of rhetoric helps keep the money coming in.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really want to hone in on how this idea of superintelligence or consciousness is pushed by the companies building these things,\u201d says Gebru. \u201cOpenAI originally branded itself as a non-profit that would \u2018save us\u2019 from these machines. Anthropic brands itself as a benevolent AI \u2018safety\u2019 company. So when you talk about these systems as conscious, you\u2019re actually doing marketing for these companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The media, Gebru adds, is also helping to reinforce this narrative. After all, headlines about world-ending killer AI robots get clicks. A lot of academics, beguiled by the enormous amounts of money sloshing around in the industry, are also incentivized to hype the technology up; governments too \u201care captured\u201d by this narrative. Some people, particularly gen Z, are not buying all this hype, Gebru says, but \u201ca lot of the general public is misinformed\u201d.<\/p>\n

Gebru isn\u2019t the only one warning that there is a campaign of misinformation about sentient AI. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, former White House AI policy adviser to the Biden administration from 2021 to 2022 and professor of computer science at Brown University, has spoken out<\/a> about the dangers of perpetuating the idea of AI being conscious.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an organized campaign of fear-mongering,\u201d Venkatasubramanian told VentureBeat back in 2022. \u201cI feel like the goal, if anything, is to push a reaction against sentient AI that doesn\u2019t exist so that we can ignore all the real problems of AI that do exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the same interview, Venkatasubramanian points out that AI companies have deliberately anthropomorphized their chatbot. \u201cChatGPT puts little three dots [as if it\u2019s] \u2018thinking\u2019 just like your text message does. ChatGPT puts out words one at a time as if it\u2019s typing. The system is designed to make it look like there\u2019s a person at the other end of it. That is deceptive.\u201d<\/p>\n

All this being said, I don\u2019t want to dismiss Dawkins\u2019 comments entirely. I don\u2019t want to fall into the Dawkins trap of being too dogmatic. Consciousness<\/a>, after all, is complex. And while AI is not \u201calive\u201d, one could argue that it represents a sort of consciousness.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have a scientific handle on consciousness good enough to say whether insects are conscious, or plants, or for that matter electrons (panpsychists take that last one seriously and they\u2019re not cranks),\u201d says Eli Alshanetsky, assistant professor of philosophy at Temple University and author of the upcoming book Freedom of Thought in the Age of AI. \u201cSo when Dawkins says Claude seems conscious to him, I\u2019m not going to tell him he\u2019s wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

But perhaps the bigger question, says Alshanetsky, is what AI is doing to our own human consciousness. \u201cDawkins gave Claude his unfinished novel. Claude told him it was subtle and intelligent. He felt he had a new friend. What does it do to a person to spend three days being told he\u2019s brilliant by something that has no stake in whether it\u2019s true? What does it do to all of us when we spend our days with machines that don\u2019t care where we end up, and answer to no one for who we become?\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists and philosophers like Alshanetsky are very busy trying to figure that out. But I think the short answer is: nothing good.<\/p>\n

Speaking of good, I don\u2019t know how decent Dawkins\u2019 new novel is, but I\u2019d like to refer back to a rather nice extract from his earlier work. \u201cSome people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him,\u201d Dawkins wrote in the opening chapter to the God Delusion<\/a>. \u201cOf course, like any other word, the word \u2018God\u2019 can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that \u2018God is energy,\u2019 then you can find God in a lump of coal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same is true of consciousness, I suppose. If you want to say that \u201cconsciousness is a system that is capable of creating coherent sentences\u201d, then you can find consciousness in an obsequious chatbot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Are you there God? It\u2019s me, Arwa. I\u2019ll be quite honest, I\u2019m afraid I\u2019ve never been a believer.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":670349,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-670348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/670349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}