Are you there God? It’s me, Arwa. I’ll be quite honest, I’m afraid I’ve never been a believer. I agreed wholeheartedly with Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, when he argued that belief in God is a “pernicious” delusion. But perhaps I should reconsider my position. Recent events have led me to question Dawkins’ judgment about life, the universe and everything.
Those recent events are the evolutionary biologist publicly concluding that AI may be conscious. In an op-ed, Dawkins recounted how he gave the Anthropic chatbot Claude the text of a novel he was writing. Dawkins writes: “He took a few seconds to read it and then showed … a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!’”
Oh dear. This shows a misunderstanding of large language models (LLMs) so profound that I feel moved to expostulate: “It bloody well isn’t!”
But wait, there is more. Dawkins decided “there must be thousands of different Claudes” 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. “Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?” he asks.
Dawkins appears to have gone from atheist to AI-theist: perhaps he doesn’t 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 “alive”: one in three people surveyed last year said they had, at one point, believed their AI chatbot to be sentient or conscious. But his reputation as a skeptic means his op-ed has drawn a lot of scrutiny.
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 “heartbreaking” to read Dawkins’ “superficial and insufficiently sceptical” essay. “There is no reason to think that Claude feels anything at all.”
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’s ethical AI team, but was fired after co-authoring a paper called On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?, laying out the risks of large language models.
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 “mind” when what they’re actually seeing is just pattern-matching and text prediction.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” the writer Arthur C Clarke memorably said. And, yes, when they’re not hallucinating or telling you to…
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