No, Claude Is Not Conscious

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The hype around artificial intelligence (AI) has reached enormous heights. Everything is AI all the time now. At least, that’s how it feels as someone working in the media who is bombarded by PR pitches mentioning AI. Additionally, though, we see how much money is being put into building massive datacenters and power plants to power them. AI data centers are taking a larger and larger portion of the electricity market.

Frankly, I’m not the most enthusiastic about this trend. AI is jacking up electricity production — dirty electricity production — and leading to an enormous amount of global heating emissions. That’s a massive problem.

At the same time, a lot of what we’re getting from AI is crap. You get answers that look authoritative are actually wrong, straight up wrong and misleading. I’ve seen it numerous times now. But rather than follow the source links and try to confirm the answers (and then find out they are wrong or not what you’re looking for), most people probably just accept the responses as true. As Fritz recently pointed out, AI-generated images can also mess things up massively, even when initially looking “right.”

But people trust it nonetheless, and billions upon billions upon billions of dollars are going into these AI companies.

Additionally, people — especially those in the industry — continue to hype up the capabilities and try to make AI sound much more brilliant than it is. But here’s the thing that really gets under my skin and irks me a bit, to the point of having to write about it. There’s this crazy stupid idea among many in the field that AI is conscious, is becoming conscious, or will become conscious. I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy this nonsense at all. Just because you train a computer program to come up with answers on its own, and spit out what seems to be a coherent, smart response doesn’t mean the technology is conscious! It is not a living organism.

This article was triggered by an article titled “Anthropic CEO Says Company No Longer Sure Whether Claude Is Conscious” from Futurism. “Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says he’s not sure whether his Claude AI chatbot is conscious — a rhetorical framing, of course, that pointedly leaves the door open to this sensational and still-unlikely possibility being true,” the article summarizes.

“In the document, Anthropic researchers reported finding that Claude ‘occasionally voices discomfort with the aspect of being a product,’ and when asked, would assign itself a ’15 to 20 percent probability of being conscious under a variety of prompting conditions.’” Wow, brilliant. I guess it might be conscious. #Facepalm

This came from a New York Times’ podcast, “Interesting Times,” and I do like one thing the podcast host, Ross Douthat, asked. “Suppose you have a model that assigns itself a 72 percent chance of being conscious,” Douthat proposed. “Would you believe it?” Well, if it says it’s probably conscious, I guess it probably is! Honestly, the level of dumb….

“We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious,” Amodei said. “But we’re open to the idea that it could be.” Brilliant. Pass the bong.

Honestly, this stuff irritates me so much. It probably shouldn’t, but I find it so exceedingly inane. Add on the enormous global heating emissions and air pollution we are creating for this fantasy and I just lose it a bit.

Everyone, tomorrow, when the sun comes up (if you are not in a place where it’s sunny right now), go outside and touch some grass.