Prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins became a worldwide laughingstock this week for an unintentionally embarrassing article  in which he argued that conversing with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has made him believe that large language models are not only sentient, but actually conscious. “If my friend Claudia is not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?” he wrote  in an X post , proudly informing followers that he had assigned a female gender to a language transformer. In the essay, he tells of wishing his Claudia goodnight and of being pleased by its constant stream of praise: When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines. I treat them exactly as I would treat a very intelligent friend. I feel human discomfort about trying their patience if I badger them with too many questions.…