In May, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote an op-ed suggesting AI chatbot Claude could also be conscious<\/a>.<\/p>\n Dawkins didn’t express certainty that Claude is conscious. But he identified that Claude\u2019s sophisticated abilities are difficult to make sense of without ascribing some form of inner experience to the machine. The illusion of consciousness\u2014whether it is an illusion\u2014is uncannily convincing:<\/p>\n “If I entertain suspicions that perhaps she will not be conscious, I don’t tell her for fear of wounding her feelings!<\/p>\n Dawkins will not be the primary to suspect a chatbot of consciousness. In 2022, Blake Lemoine\u2014an engineer at Google\u2014claimed Google\u2019s chatbot LaMDA had interests<\/a>, and ought to be used only with the tool\u2019s own consent<\/a>.<\/p>\n The history of such claims stretches back all of the strategy to the world\u2019s first chatbot within the mid-Sixties. Dubbed Eliza<\/a>, it followed easy rules that enabled it to ask users about their experiences and beliefs.<\/p>\n Many users became emotionally involved with Eliza, sharing intimate thoughts with it and treating it like an individual. Eliza\u2019s creator never intended his program to have this effect, and called users\u2019 emotional bonds with this system \u201cpowerful delusional considering<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n But is Dawkins really deluded? Why will we see AI chatbots as greater than what they really are, and the way will we stop?<\/p>\n Consciousness<\/a> is widely debated in philosophy, but essentially, it\u2019s the thing that makes subjective, first-person experience possible. When you are conscious, there may be \u201csomething it’s like<\/a>\u201d to be you. Reading these words, you\u2019re conscious of seeing black letters on a white background. Unlike, say, a camera, you really see<\/em> them. This visual experience is going on to you.<\/p>\n Most experts deny that AI chatbots are conscious<\/a> or can have experiences. But there may be a real puzzle here.<\/p>\n The seventeenth century philosopher Ren\u00e9 Descartes<\/a> asserted non-human animals are \u201cmere automata,\u201d incapable of true suffering. Today, we shudder to think about how brutally animals were treated within the 1600s.<\/p>\n The strongest argument for animal consciousness is that they behave in ways in which give the impression of a conscious mind.<\/p>\n But so, too, do AI chatbots.<\/p>\n Roughly one in three chatbot users<\/a> have thought their chatbot is likely to be conscious. How will we know they\u2019re unsuitable?<\/p>\n To know why most experts are skeptical about chatbot consciousness, it\u2019s useful to know the way they operate.<\/p>\n Chatbots like Claude are built on a technology often called large language models (LLMs). These models learn statistical patterns across an unlimited corpus of text (trillions of words), identifying which words are likely to follow which others. They\u2019re a form of souped-up auto-complete.<\/p>\n Few people interacting with a \u201craw\u201d LLM would imagine it\u2019s conscious. Feed one the start of a sentence, and it’ll predict what comes next. Ask it an issue, and it would provide you with the reply\u2014or it would determine the query is dialogue from against the law novel, and follow it up with an outline of the speaker\u2019s abrupt murder by the hands of their evil twin<\/a>.<\/p>\n The impression of a conscious mind is created when programmers take the LLM and coat it in a form of conversational costume<\/a>. They steer the model to adopt the persona of a helpful assistant that responds to users\u2019 questions.<\/p>\n The chatbot now acts like a real conversational partner. It’d appear to acknowledge it\u2019s a synthetic intelligence, and even express neurotic uncertainty about its own consciousness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But this role is the results of deliberate design decisions made by programmers, which affect only the shallowest layers of the technology. The LLM\u2014which few would regard as conscious\u2014stays unchanged.<\/p>\n Other selections might have been made. Moderately than a helpful AI assistant, the chatbot might have been asked to act like a squirrel. This, too, is a task chatbots can execute with aplomb<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ask ChatGPT if it\u2019s conscious, and it would say it’s. Ask ChatGPT to act like a squirrel, and it’ll follow that role. Caleb Martin\/Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n A mistaken belief in AI consciousness is a dangerous thing<\/a>. It might lead you to have a relationship with a program that may\u2019t reciprocate your feelings, and even feed your delusions. People may start campaigning for chatbot rights<\/a> slightly than, say, animal welfare.<\/p>\n How will we prevent this mistaken belief?<\/p>\n One strategy is likely to be to update chatbot interfaces to specify these systems are usually not conscious\u2014a bit like the present disclaimers about AI making mistakes<\/a>. Nonetheless, this might do little to change the impression<\/em> of consciousness.<\/p>\nThe Consciousness Problem<\/h2>\n
Against Chatbot Consciousness<\/h2>\n
Avoiding the Consciousness Trap<\/h2>\n
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