this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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What's going on with Dawkins? I have followed his decline with interest.
I saw a YT video last week that referenced Dawkins' work, and I was like, Oh yea, he used to be a respected scientist before he became an Epstein Island public bigot and TERF. Fame did to Dawkins what the One Ring did to Gollam.
He posted some Tweets about how he believes ChatGPT (or whichever AI service he uses, I can't recall) is sentient, and of course, female.
Has someone done a study on this? I've noticed everyone who claims to have a relationship with, if they're male it's female and vice versa. This includes married people and those in relationships
While the post is cringe inducing and dawkins is an ass, he doesn't quite say that claude is sentient. More that the ways we use to define it are all basically met by an llm. And argues that we need a better way to define it.
Basically arguing about a philisophical zombie
https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/#comment-1031777
(paywalled, but can be mitigated by the firefox reader mode, for example)
It's pretty simple, what's the LLM thinking about when it's not actively being prompted?
Does an LLM have the same "consciousness" when talking to someone else? Does the LLM even exist if it's not actively being talked to? If everyone just stops talking to it, does it "die" until someone else logs in and submits a prompt?
Claude.
It would be hilarious if he called ChatGPT Claudia though. If it was actually sentient, it might get offended.
You can't retain your level of intelligence forever, unfortunately. He's probably heading the same way I've seen people I watched get older and slip into things that I know they would have laughed off years before. Now he may have been a bigot and an asshole before, but him not understanding LLMs and their limitations suggests a definite decline in reasoning, from the person who helped me grasp evolutionary theory and the scale of time with his books.
Nah, he was always kind of a dick. Doesn’t mean his work wasn’t meaningful but it was kind of always there
yup! waaay too may r/atheist types replaced their religious upbringing with hero worship of dawkins and iefused to see what a problematic figure he really was
I'm so happy I never joined Twitter lol