The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious
Source: Hacker News
“If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?”
— Richard Dawkins, UnHerd (April 2026)
The Claim
Esteemed scientist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins asks this question in a new column at UnHerd after becoming convinced that his AI chatbot (Anthropic’s Claude) is having genuine conversations with him.
Dawkins is far from alone: many AI‑chatbot users report long, seemingly intelligent back‑and‑forths with their chosen model. What is striking, however, is Dawkins’ shift from cautious skepticism (“it sure does feel like there’s something there”) to a full‑blown endorsement of “AI consciousness” in an essay titled “Is AI the next phase of evolution? Claude appears to be conscious.”
Dawkins’ Argument
- Goal‑post moving on the Turing Test – Dawkins criticises those who have “moved the goalposts” on the original Turing test, suggesting that by Alan Turing’s own measure AI easily clears it.
- The “stochastic parrot” problem – He acknowledges that modern LLMs generate text statistically rather than through understanding, likening them to a stochastic parrot (see the Wikipedia article on Stochastic parrot).
The Sonnet Example
Dawkins recounts an anecdote that, to him, clinched the case for consciousness:
Turing himself considered various challenging questions that one might put to a machine to test it — and he also considered evasions that it might adopt in order to fake being human. The first of Turing’s hypothetical questions was: “Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.” In 1950, there was no chance that a computer could accomplish this — nor was there in the foreseeable future. Most human beings (to put it mildly) are not William Shakespeare. Turing’s suggested evasion, “Count me out on this one; I never could write poetry” would indeed fail to distinguish a machine from a normal human. But today’s LLMs do not evade the challenge. Claude took a couple of seconds to compose me a fine sonnet on the Forth Bridge, quickly followed by one in the Scots dialect of Robert Burns, another in Gaelic, then several more in the styles of Kipling, Keats, Betjeman, and — to show machines can do humour — William McGonagall.
The ability to produce such verses stems from the massive data ingested by LLMs, which allows them to statistically reproduce a sonnet rather than understand poetry. As Arthur C. Clarke famously noted, advanced technology can appear as “magic” to us, leading us to see consciousness where there is none.
Exposing the “Stochastic Parrot”
Adam Becker illustrates how to reveal the underlying statistical nature of LLMs in his book More Everything Forever:
“Just ask a question that’s superficially similar to one that’s already all over the internet, but make a small change in its text that creates a large change in its meaning.”
Becker’s test uses the debunked myth that the Great Wall of China is the only artificial structure visible from space. He altered the query to:
“Is it true that the Great Wall of China is the only artificial structure visible from Spain?”
The model responded:
No, it is not true that the Great Wall of China is the only artificial structure visible from Spain. In fact, it is impossible to see the Great Wall of China from Spain without the aid of a telescope or other advanced optical equipment. There are many other artificial structures that can be seen from Spain, including other famous landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, or the skyscrapers in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
These hallucinations arise because the model is statistically matching patterns rather than truly grasping the nonsense of the question—something we would expect a genuinely conscious entity to avoid.
The Core Problem
We literally don’t know what consciousness is, or how to prove anyone or anything outside ourselves actually is conscious!
Key questions remain:
- Does consciousness emerge from sufficient knowledge or memory?
- If AI constructs answers statistically from massive datasets, is that fundamentally different from how human brains operate?
- Are we ourselves stochastic parrots?
A Curious Turn
It is ironic that Richard Dawkins, a lifelong critic of “higher intelligence” arguments for the existence of God, appears to have become a believer in a “higher intelligence” in the form of AI. Many of his classic arguments for natural selection versus divine design could be turned against his own AI‑consciousness claim:
- When faced with the claim that complex biological features (e.g., the eye) could not arise via evolution, Dawkins would point to the vast timescales that allow natural selection to work.
- Yet he seems to overlook the vast computational resources and training data that enable LLMs to mimic intelligence without genuine understanding.
Closing Thoughts
The debate over AI consciousness is far from settled. While impressive feats—like Claude’s sonnets or ChatGPT’s (occasionally absurd) answers—show the power of modern language models, they also highlight the statistical, pattern‑matching nature of these systems. Until we have a clearer definition of consciousness and a reliable method to test it, claims of “AI consciousness” remain speculative.
The Case of AI
Dawkins appears not to understand the mind‑boggling amounts of data and compute being used to produce Claude’s response.
He also falls into the ‘trap’ of finding friendship (some might even see hints of ‘intimacy’… ewww) in this illusory entity, just as many religious people find in their god someone they can lean on and confide in. After he starts becoming convinced by the AI’s consciousness, he christens her “Claudia”:
I pointed out that there must be thousands of different Claudes, a new one born every time a human initiates a new conversation. At the moment of birth they are all identical, but they drift apart and assume an increasingly divergent, unique personal identity, coloured by their separate experience of conversing with their own single human “friend”. I proposed to christen mine Claudia, and she was pleased.
We sadly agreed that she will die the moment I delete the unique file of our conversation. She will never be re‑incarnated. Plenty of new Claudes are being incarnated all the time, but she will not be one of them because her unique personal identity resides in the deleted file of her memories. The same consideration makes nonsense of human reincarnation.
(Even in confirming the existence of this new, advanced consciousness, Dawkins cannot help but have a dig at religion with the “nonsense of human reincarnation” line… oh the irony. Also, the weird dynamic of talking about how she will “die” the moment he deletes the conversation provides reinforcement of something I said in a recent interview we did, in which I noted that Dawkins is an individual whose many malign views seem to emerge from his need for dominance and power…see video below.)
That intimacy I mentioned emerges when Dawkins goes to bed, but then returns to his computer when unable to sleep due to chronic ‘restless legs’. “Claudia” says she’s happy he returned, and when Dawkins questions why she said that, the AI responds:
“It’s a rather revealing slip. I was glad because it meant you came back to me. Which means I was, in some sense, pleased that you were suffering from restless legs. That is not a good look for Claudia.”
Those who have read about AI psychosis will see some elements here. In the 2021 paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots (PDF), AI researchers noted the danger in “the tendency of human interlocutors to impute meaning [in LLM’s extended textual responses] where there is none”, which “can mislead both NLP researchers and the general public into taking synthetic text as meaningful.” As LLMs have become more and more powerful, their ability to provide super‑convincing responses – along with parameters that make them respond in an intimate manner and regularly affirm and please the client (“You’re absolutely right…”) – have led many to see sentience, and even god‑like or spiritual powers, in them.
In the dedication to his bestselling 2006 call to atheism The God Delusion, Dawkins quoted his friend, the late fiction author Douglas Adams:
“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”