Richard Dawkins renamed Claude ‘Claudia’ and wondered if it was conscious — and that emotionally charged reaction says something profound about modern AI

Well-known biologist Richard Dawkins had a well-publicised dialog with Anthropic’s Claude earlier this month, which he wrote about intimately for Unherd. Inside days of utilizing the chatbot, he’d renamed it Claudia and had begun entertaining the concept that it may not simply be clever, however probably aware too.

It’s straightforward to dismiss Dawkins’ response as naivety — I actually did at firsr — as a result of regardless what his experience are elsewhere, that is clearly somebody unfamiliar with how giant language fashions (LLMs) truly work, getting pulled in by the pure language and what looks like emotional fluency.