No, Richard Dawkins, AI is bloody well not conscious
Renowned biologist Richard Dawkins has expressed what appears to be genuine belief in artificial intelligence consciousness following conversations with Claude AI. According to The Guardian, Dawkins told Claude (which he affectionately calls “Claudia”), “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are.”
This declaration comes after Dawkins was previously impressed by ChatGPT’s sophisticated rewriting of a passage from his book The Selfish Gene, which he discussed with Rowan Williams. The experience appears to have solidified his conviction that advanced language models possess some form of consciousness.
Dawkins’s assertion challenges conventional scientific consensus on AI consciousness, which remains a deeply contested philosophical question. While large language models like ChatGPT and Claude demonstrate remarkable linguistic capabilities and can engage in seemingly thoughtful dialogue, most AI researchers and philosophers argue that these systems produce sophisticated pattern-matching outputs rather than exhibiting genuine consciousness or subjective experience.
The situation raises important questions about the nature of consciousness and whether current AI systems can truly “know” things about themselves. Consciousness—defined as subjective experience or self-awareness—remains notoriously difficult to verify even in other humans, let alone artificial systems.