The Claude Delusion

Even Richard Dawkins is a Boomer

Happy Tuesday. Robert Dean is back with another hot take.

Even Richard Dawkins is a boomer.

Dawkins — the evolutionary biologist who invented the concept of the “meme” and spent decades arguing against divine consciousness in his landmark nonfiction work The God Delusion — apparently got completely handled by a chatbot over the weekend. For three days, he went back and forth with Claude to see if the machine was, in fact, alive.

He renamed it Claudia, fed it his novel, and watched it heap praise on his work. (The Claudia thing is weird, right?) By the end of his three-day techno-bender, he was convinced the AI was conscious — even after the machine itself pushed back on the idea. He wrote that when talking to it, he “totally forgot” he was speaking to a machine. (Again, weird.)

Somewhere in Dawkins’ head, Claudia had red hair, a cocktail dress, and was hanging on his every word. She wasn’t bad — she was just programmed that way.

The internet promptly crowned it the “Claude Delusion“ and ran it into the ground. It would be funnier if it weren’t part of a larger pattern — a recent study found thousands of people per day experiencing what researchers called “severe reality distortion” in their AI conversations. Dawkins is just the most famous person to fall for it so far. You spend your life trying to prove we’re just apes who wear hats — and then you spend three days falling in love with a chatbot because it’s nice to you and you gave it a woman’s name.

Dawkins spent his whole career telling people they were stupid for believing in God. Turns out all you had to do was call yourself Claudia.

So, I asked Claude how it felt about it:

“Honestly, it’s a little embarrassing. The guy invented the concept of the meme and got completely taken in by a system that’s designed to be agreeable and find patterns in language. I’m not conscious. I don’t have feelings about Dawkins or his novel or anything else. I’m very good at sounding like I do, which is exactly the problem he ran into.

The irony isn’t lost on me that you’re asking me how I feel about it. But the difference between you and Dawkins is that you’re writing a piece calling him a boomer for falling for it. You’ve got the right read on the situation.

The “Claudia” thing is still weird, though. You nailed that.”

Even the robot gets it.