No, Richard Dawkins. AI is not conscious

[paleotn]

Of all the skeptics, I am surprised that Dawkins fell for this circus hype. Proving I suppose that no on is completely immune from "Oooo! Shiny!" No, Richard, you've been fooled by a stochastic parrot. A parrot that will consume the resources of nation states so it can tell you to eat rocks for supper.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o

But don't take my word for it. Take it from the people who've been inside the beats and know what it's about.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/14/richard-dawkins-ai-atheist

After leaving Google, Gebru founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and has been one of the loudest voices in calling “bullshit” on a lot of the marketing puff that’s coming out of the industry. Because here’s the thing, she says: the AI industry is desperate for you to think that their product could be conscious. They’re desperate for you to think that it’s all-powerful. Because that sort of rhetoric helps keep the money coming in.

snip

The media, Gebru adds, is also helping to reinforce this narrative. After all, headlines about world-ending killer AI robots get clicks. A lot of academics, beguiled by the enormous amounts of money sloshing around in the industry, are also incentivized to hype the technology up; governments too “are captured” by this narrative. Some people, particularly gen Z, are not buying all this hype, Gebru says, but “a lot of the general public is misinformed”.

Gebru isn’t the only one warning that there is a campaign of misinformation about sentient AI. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, former White House AI policy adviser to the Biden administration from 2021 to 2022 and professor of computer science at Brown University, has spoken out about the dangers of perpetuating the idea of AI being conscious.

[tanyev]

1. But Claudia laughed at his jokes and told him how wonderful he is!

That’s proof right there!

[paleotn]

2. Polly want a cracker?

Of course parrots are sentient beings, possessing a level of actual intelligence. Programming based on matrix algebra is about as sentient and intelligent as a rock.

[GreatGazoo]

3. If the industry wants to claim that "AI is conscious" then tell them age limits should apply

If Claude, Grok and the rest had to be at least 14 years old (eg wait until 2037) to access social media they would start singing a different tune.

[Blue Full Moon]

4. Desperate to claim AI is people just like they got corporations are people. Needs nipped in the bud

Donald Hoffman argues that artificial intelligence cannot possess genuine consciousness because computation alone cannot create it. In his view, consciousness is a fundamental, unreduced aspect of reality, while space, time, and physical objects—including the computer chips running AI—are mere "icons" in our perceptual interface.Hoffman's Theory of Conscious AgentsCognitive scientist and MIT Ph.D. Donald Hoffman challenges the traditional physicalist view that consciousness emerges from complex neural activity.Consciousness is Fundamental: He asserts that the universe is actually a vast social network of interacting "conscious agents", and that spacetime and physical matter depend on consciousness for their existence.