ELIZA SMILES: Famed Atheist Richard Dawkins — Author of ‘The God Delusion’ — Believes AI Is Conscious.

Dawkins argues that Claude and ChatGPT both passed the Turing Test: That the telltale sign of consciousness is when an AI can communicate so flawlessly, it’s indistinguishable from a human.

And since Claude/Claudia, ChatGPT (and others) can already do that, then they must surely be conscious:

When Turing wrote — and for most of the years since — it was possible to accept the hypothetical conclusion that, if a machine ever passed his operational test, we might consider it to be conscious. We were comfortably secure in the confidence that this was a very big if, kicked into future touch. However, the advent of large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others has provoked a hasty scramble to move the goalposts. It was one thing to grant consciousness to a hypothetical machine that — just imagine! — could one day succeed at the Imitation Game. But now that LLMs can actually pass the Turing Test? “Well, er, perhaps, um… Look here, I didn’t really mean it when, back then, I accepted Turing’s operational definition of a conscious being…”

But that’s less an argument for AI consciousness and more an indictment of the Turing Test’s fallibility. (Turns out the Turing Test was mostly a test of human gullibility.) Perhaps one day, AIs will achieve true consciousness; perhaps they won’t — but prior to achieving consciousness they’re very likely to replicate the appearance of consciousness via mimicry.

Unfortunately, there’s no known scientific experiment to distinguish between these two states.

So Dawkins, the world-famous atheist, took a leap of faith — because of how “Claudia” made his heart feel. It eerily echoes Jeremiah 29:13: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”

Other scientists pooh-poohed Dawkins’ conclusion.

Somebody’s been watching Scarlett Johansson’s Her a few too many times. Or maybe talking too much with Siri:

(Classical reference in headline.)