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.
He’s probably not quite understanding exactly how this is now considered incorrect, as well. I myself find myself struggling to comprehend the wrongness of the at-the-time genteel/ barely socially acceptable (depending on the perception of others) manners my family and social circle taught me, and I’m a few decades behind him! That’s not even taking into account a myriad of different social circles as decades go by, or quite possibly more forgotten than learned, by my age now (I’m well into the second half or last third of my years, give or take a decade, depending on undeveloped and unforeseen circumstances). In other words, sometimes the gears slip with age and wear and tear. 🤭