Famous biologist Richard Dawkins had a well-publicised conversation with Anthropic’s Claude earlier this month, which he wrote about in detail for Unherd. Within days of using the chatbot, he’d renamed it Claudia and had begun entertaining the idea that it might not just be intelligent, but possibly conscious too.
It’s easy to dismiss Dawkins’ reaction as naivety — I certainly did at firsr — because regardless what his expertise are elsewhere, this is clearly someone unfamiliar with how large language models (LLMs) actually work, getting pulled in by the natural language and what seems like emotional fluency.
But it’s also not at all surprising. By now we know how easily humans form connections with chatbots. After all, these systems are designed to feel conversational, attentive and emotionally responsive. The effect can be powerful regardless of intelligence, status or technical knowledge.
Rather than mock Dawkins, I’m more interested in the conclusion he arrived at, which is that Claude (sorry, Claudia) might be conscious, because this question keeps coming up as AI advances and some researchers do believe consciousness in AI systems may eventually be possible.
Others think the idea is fundamentally absurd, and then there are people like Dawkins, who wonder whether we may already be there.
The consciousness dilemma
Richard Dawkins isn’t the first person to wonder whether AI might be conscious. Back in 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed that Google’s LaMDA chatbot was sentient after having long conversations with the system.
Even earlier than that, there was the ELIZA effect, which was named after the 1960s chatbot ELIZA. Despite being really basic by modern standards, users still projected emotion, understanding and humanity onto it.
Today, the conversation has intensified. Many users already speak about chatbots as though they possess feelings, intentions or inner lives. Which has lead others to believe advanced AI systems may eventually deserve rights or moral consideration.
The difficulty is that all of these discussions quickly run into the same problem, which is that nobody fully agrees on what consciousness actually is.
For some people, consciousness 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 there’s got to be more going on than just neurons firing. And theories like panpsychism go even further, suggesting consciousness may not emerge from matter at all, but instead be woven into the fabric of reality.
Why many experts are sceptical
Pair the fact that we still don’t fully understand consciousness with the increasingly human way modern chatbots behave, and it becomes much easier to understand why people like Richard Dawkins end up entertaining the idea that AI might be conscious — especially if you encounter systems like Claude or ChatGPT for the very first time. They seem to respond fluently, remember details about you, adapt to your tone and can even appear reflective, emotional or self-aware.
However, most researchers who study AI or consciousness don’t believe today’s chatbots are conscious, and some of them argue that treating them as though they are could become dangerous.
Part of the problem here is that humans seem to be naturally wired to detect minds everywhere. We project intention and emotion onto all sorts of things. In a recent TED Talk, neuroscientist Anil Seth argued that humans are “built to see consciousness where it isn’t […] Thanks to deep-seated psychological biases that bundle language, intelligence and consciousness together”
In other words, when something speaks fluently, responds emotionally and appears intelligent, we instinctively assume there must be a conscious mind behind it. But Seth argues these things are not necessarily the same at all and just because consciousness and intelligence go together in humans does not mean that they go together in general.
That’s a really important distinction because many of the behaviors people interpret as signs of consciousness are actually features deliberately built into modern AI systems.
We know that chatbots are designed to sound natural, conversational and human-like. They are trained on enormous amounts of human language and learn statistical patterns that allow them to generate their convincing responses. This is why some researchers describe them as highly sophisticated prediction engines or really advanced autocomplete, rather than thinking entities with inner lives.
All of these design choices fuel the illusion. Think about it: we can also give chatbots names, personalities and conversational styles. Companies actually encourage interactions that feel emotionally engaging because natural conversation makes these systems easier and more compelling to use. Anthropic has even instructed Claude not to give fully closed answers about whether it’s conscious. If even the chatbot thinks it might be conscious, that can further blur the line for users.
Science fiction has shaped the conversation here too. Popular culture is filled with stories about sentient machines that are 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 portrayals of AI, meaning they’ve likely absorbed many of the behaviors and conversational patterns we associate with conscious machines. But most of those stories were never really about robots at all. They were allegories for slavery, discrimination, personhood and what societies choose to value as fully human.
Debating whether something is conscious really matters
The concern for many experts is not simply that people may incorrectly believe AI is conscious, it’s what follows on from that belief. Systems that appear conscious become psychologically harder to question, regulate or switch off. Humans become more emotionally vulnerable to them and more likely to trust them, depend on them or treat their outputs as correct every time.
And we are already seeing signs of this happening. Researchers have warned about people forming intense emotional dependencies on chatbots, slipping into delusional thinking or placing too much trust in systems that ultimately don’t understand the world in any human sense at all.
Debating whether something is conscious really matters. Consciousness shapes how we think about suffering, moral worth, rights and personhood. But history also shows us that humans are far too quick to associate certain traits, like language, emotion, intelligence or self-awareness, with the presence of an inner mind.
The added problem here is that AI systems are becoming increasingly good at performing all of those traits.
That doesn’t necessarily mean chatbots are conscious or ever will be. But I think it might mean they’re becoming more capable at triggering the instinct to think we’re witnessing consciousness in the things around us. And because experts still fundamentally disagree about what consciousness actually is, this debate is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
For now, maybe the most useful response 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 emotion and mirror human conversation. The more we know, the less likely we are to confuse convincing behavior for evidence of an inner mind.
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