Despite Anthropic’s claims, Claude is no more likely to achieve sentience than a simulation of a weather system is likely to generate a real hurricane

For centuries, humans have been fascinated by the prospect of creating artificial beings in our own image. Of developing synthetic minds and artificial bodies that not only think but also feel, and are both intelligent and conscious. For the vast majority of this time, this prospect seemed very distant; a topic for science fiction and philosophy, not for the here and now. But over the past few years, the rapid rise of AI – and especially of language models – has changed everything.

Last week, the frontier AI firm Anthropic published new research on its language model, Claude, in which the researchers claimed to find signs of consciousness emerging within its inner workings. They didn’t claim that Claude is actually conscious in the same way that humans are, but the findings certainly upped the ante on the possibility of consciousness arising in AI.

Anil Seth is professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and co-director of the Sussex centre for consciousness science. He is the author of Being You

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