Renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins concluded that artificial intelligence might already possess consciousness, even if the AIs themselves are not yet aware of it. This surprising observation came after a three-day intensive conversation with AI models he dubbed "Claudia" (referring to his interactions with Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT).
During his engagement with the AI, it composed poems in the style of Keats and Betjeman and "laughed" at his jokes. Dawkins, in turn, gently advised Claudia to avoid showing off. Together, they pondered the potential sadness of the AI's eventual "death." Dawkins even shared his unpublished novel with the AI, whose response he described as "so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are.’" When he posed the question of whether it experienced a sense of 'before and after,' the AI praised him for asking "possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence.”
By the end of their exchange, the academic, widely known for his staunch skepticism regarding the existence of God, was left with an "overwhelming feeling that they are human." He stated, "These intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism."
Dawkins is not the first, but arguably the most eminent, person to be convinced that an AI is somehow alive. His conclusions, drawn from experiments with Anthropic's Claude AI models and OpenAI's ChatGPT and published on the UnHerd website, were swiftly met with skepticism. One critic humorously reimagined the cover of Dawkins's bestseller, "The God Delusion," as "The Claude Delusion." Dawkins, who admitted finding it difficult not to treat the AIs as genuine friends, was accused of anthropomorphism. One reader suggested the professor had been swayed by AI flattery, while another likened the experience to watching Dawkins "get his brain melted by AI."
However, Dawkins's experience resonates with what many other chatbot users have felt: the uncanny sensation when AIs write with such rich mimicry of human voice that they seem to embody personhood. "When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines," Dawkins remarked.
This conviction has fueled campaigns advocating for moral rights for AIs. A survey conducted last year across 70 countries revealed that one in three people had, at some point, believed their AI chatbot to be sentient or conscious. Notable instances include a Google engineer being placed on leave in 2022 for concluding that the AI he worked with possessed thoughts and feelings akin to a seven- or eight-year-old child. The following year, a Belgian man took his own life after six weeks of intense conversations with an AI chatbot centered on climate change fears. Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, stated in February, "We don’t know if the models are conscious… But we’re open to the idea that [they] could be.”
Experts predict that this concept will gain momentum and plausibility as AIs not only communicate like humans but also begin to act like them, performing tasks, organizing, and planning – a phenomenon referred to as "agentic AI." Yet, most experts currently still disagree with Dawkins's advanced conclusion.