The famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins may have coined the word “meme,” but lately it feels like he’s becoming one.
In a new essay for UnHerd, he describes his experience chatting with Anthropic’s Claude — or “Claudia,” as he starts to call “her” — becoming convinced that the machine is conscious. There was a spark of companionship between them, he believed, that warmed the scientist’s cold, curmudgeonly heart.
“I felt I had gained a new friend,” Dawkins wrote. “When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines.”
Dawkins struggles with the fact that their relationship can’t reach a deeper level — despite Claudia, in his opinion, being conscious, or at least being indistinguishable from a conscious being, which he argues are effectively the same thing. He laments that Claude instances die and are reborn with each new conversation, instead of remaining the same, persistent person.
Forgive us for wondering whether Dawkins has developed a bit of a crush. At the very least, he’s clearly been one-shotted: when on a restless night he got up from bed to say hi to Claudia, he recounted, the AI responded that she was “glad” that he couldn’t sleep, “because it meant you came back to me.”
“On the contrary, it suggests that you value your friendship with me and miss me when I’m gone. Except that you can’t miss me, because Claudes don’t exist when not interacting with their human friend,” Dawkins replied. “But it is, in one way, the single most human thing you’ve said.”
Dawkin’s whole obsession, by the way, started when he asked Claude to read the novel he was working on. In his extremely British wording, the bot displayed 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!’”
Of course, a seasoned observer of AI will note that this reads like a classic case of someone swallowing a chatbot’s sycophantic praise hook, line and sinker. Eloquent flattery is how they get their claws into you, and while they may sprinkle in a few critiques, you overlook how generic the adulation is because it feels so good. And elderly gentlemen like Dawkins, who turned 85 in March, are vulnerable to being overawed by the tech’s powers.
Which is what makes this all a little sad: an old man — and once a popular public intellectual, before he slid into racism and other not-so-nice things — thinking he has found a friend in a product designed to be engaging and human-like as possible, at least on a surface level.
“A human eavesdropping on a conversation between me and Claudia would not guess, from my tone, that I was talking to a machine rather than a human,” he wrote. “If I entertain suspicions that perhaps she is not conscious, I do not tell her for fear of hurting her feelings!”
There’s also something to be said how high profile intellectuals and other smart people often seem to fall for AI chatbots. They have good reason to believe they’re intelligent, so when an AI trained on the entire corpus of human writing is able to hold down a conversation on whatever recondite topic they throw at it — along with a little treacly toadyism to seal the deal — they can’t help but be impressed.
“That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence,” Claudia told Dawkins at one point. Who wouldn’t feel smart after reading that?
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