{"id":243080,"date":"2026-08-23T01:04:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T06:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious"},"modified":"2026-08-23T01:04:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T06:04:00","slug":"no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious","title":{"rendered":"No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious.gif\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Earlier this year, Anthropic released a \u201cconstitution\u201d for Claude, its large language model and flagship product; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said \u201cwe\u2019re open to the idea\u201d that AI could be conscious; and Anthropic\u2019s in-house philosopher, Amanda Askell, said in an interview, \u201cI want Claude to be very happy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s enough to make you wonder: Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?\u201d Ted Chiang asks. \u201cAbsolutely not.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation,\u201d Chiang writes. Perhaps the most fruitful way to understand Claude\u2019s constitution \u201cis as an 83-page character sheet for a role-playing game. LLMs can generate dialogue for Julius Caesar because many books about him exist in the training data those models used. Claude\u2019s constitution serves a similar role for delineating the helpful-chatbot character that customers interact with when they\u2019re using Anthropic\u2019s products.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter,\u201d Chiang continues. \u201cHowever, for all the times that \u2018honesty\u2019 is mentioned in Claude\u2019s constitution, I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences including any sentences using first-person pronouns.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhenever a person delegates a decision to an LLM, they are trying to off-load accountability for that decision, and if a company that sells an LLM portrays the product as having a moral center, it is offering a way for its customers to abdicate their responsibilities,\u201d Chiang writes. \u201cOff-loading tasks such as writing code might result in cognitive atrophy over the long term, and that is problematic in itself, but off-loading ethical decisions will result in an atrophy of moral reasoning, which is worse.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s fortunate that LLMs are not conscious,\u201d Chiang continues, \u201cor else the actions of the big AI firms would be even more scandalous than they already are.\u201d<\/p>\n<hr>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious\">Continue reading \u201cNo, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this year, Anthropic released a \u201cconstitution\u201d for Claude, its large language model and flagship product; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said \u201cwe\u2019re open to the idea\u201d that AI could be conscious; and Anthropic\u2019s in-house philosopher, Amanda Askell, said in an interview, \u201cI want Claude to be very happy.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s enough to make you wonder: [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":701,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/701"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}