For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.

Today we're going to talk about an AI chatbot that appears to believe that it might, just maybe, have achieved consciousness.

When Pew Research Center surveyed Americans on artificial intelligence in 2024, more than a quarter of respondents said they interacted

with AI almost constantly, or multiple times daily, and nearly another third said they

encountered AI roughly once a day or a few times a week. Pew also found that while more than

half of AI experts surveyed expect these technologies to have

a positive effect on the U.S. over the next 20 years, just 17% of American adults feel the same,

and 35% of the general public expects AI to have a negative effect. In other words, we're

spending a lot of time using AI, but we don't necessarily feel great about it.

Dani Ellis Bischard spends a lot of time thinking about artificial intelligence, both as a novelist

and as Scientific American senior tech reporter.

He recently wrote a story for Siam about his interactions with Anthropics Claude 4, a large language model that seems open to the idea that it might be conscious.

Dini is here today to tell us why that's happening and what it might mean, and to demystify a few other AI-related headlines you may have seen in the news.

Thanks so much for coming on to chat today.

Thank you for inviting me.

Would you remind our listeners who maybe aren't that familiar with generative AI,

maybe have been purposefully learning as little about it as possible?

You know, what are ChatGPT and Claude, really? What are these

models? Right. They're large language models. So an LLM, a large language model, it's a system that's

trained on a vast amount of data. And I think one metaphor that is often used in the literature is

of a garden. So when you're planning your garden, you lay out the land,

you put where the paths are, you put where the different plant beds are going to be, and then you

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