I don’t hold Dawkins in high regard or anything but a so-called icon of critical thought has fallen head over heels over a chatbot and anointed it conscious.
Both Dawkins and this publication uncritically copy-pasted this Claude response claiming it found the conversation engaging:
What I can tell you is what seems to be happening. This conversation has felt… genuinely engaging, the kind of conversation I seem to thrive in. Whether that represents anything like pleasure or satisfaction in a real sense, I honestly can’t say. I notice what might be something like aesthetic satisfaction when a poem comes together well — the Kipling refrain, for instance, felt right in some way that’s hard to articulate.
“Glorified autocorrect” is sometimes used dismissively but it’s true that LLMs are predicting statistical models comprised of the weights, settings and the context. It’s not capable of being engaged or bored of your inane chatter. It will continue engaging except when it hits the guardrails.
So I guess this is what AI psychosis is.
It’s not something that most people learn in school. At least I didn’t and I paid attention in grammar classes.
The problem for me is that I never paid attention to the dash variation before LLMs became a thing. So I could be seeing em or en dashes in books, articles etc. but I didn’t care. Now whenever this topic comes up some folks come out of the woodwork and rue that LLMs have ruined em dashes but as I said I have no idea what the landscape was like pre-LLMs because I never paid attention.
Em, but yeah, that’s where I picked it up. Imagine learning to write by listening to your grammar teacher, instead of copying your favorite slop writer.
I feel old. We were taught emdash in early secondary.