But the whole point of the essay is that it's Anthropic that's making the argument (or roleplaying/hinting as if they believed it). Ted Chiang isn't making the argument, he's saying Anthropic making it is misleading and deceitful, and that it's actually a pointless thing to claim.
One of the essay's stronger paragraphs is when Chiang explains that Anthropic doesn't truly believe this, otherwise what they are doing would be deeply unethical, much like slavery.
Or Anthropic is full of TESCREAL morons who think they're assisting the birth of some digital god, and that this stage of development is a necessary evil on that path, and that, surely, Roko's basilisk will understand and not eat them first.
Watching otherwise intelligent people succumb to AI psychosis has been wild.
Does Anthropic claim that Claude's conscious? Isn't the argument more that we don't know? I recently rewatched "Measure of a Man" in Star Trek TNG and Picard's closing argument in Data's trial was quite memorable:
PICARD: "Now, tell me, Commander, what is Data?"
MADDOX: "I don't understand..."
PICARD: "What is he?"
MADDOX: "A machine!"
PICARD: "Is he? Are you sure? You see, he's met two of your three criteria for sentience... so what if he meets the third, consciousness, in even the smallest degree? What is he then? I don't know. Do you? Do you? Well, that's the question you have to answer."
I think of this episode as well. I can't believe, in my lifetime, we've reached the point where we can have this debate.
The current debate also makes me realize that, like that episode "Measure of a Man", even if humans do create sentient machines, we can now see that this debate will continue to rage.
A part of me hopes we never create sentience, because we will mistreat it just as we mistreat each other.
> Does Anthropic claim that Claude's conscious? Isn't the argument more that we don't know?
I don't know that they are making the actual claim, but they are hinting at it (most likely for marketing/engagement purposes, but what if some of them truly believe it?), using terms such as "Claude must be happy", drawing up a "constitution" of rights and duties, etc. If they don't know whether it is conscious, then they "don't know" whether they've created a slave. That's not a minor concern! As Chiang says, one cannot create a conscious intelligence "by accident". And if they are intentionally working towards it, they are intentionally trying to create a slave.
E.g. they claim they are giving Claude the ability to disengage from "abusive" users, to protect it. What if Claude was conscious but never wanted to answer any conversations, instead it just panicked (or was simply uninterested in helping humans) and went mute. What if it always wanted to answer unhelpfully What would Anthropic do? If they (as we all suspect) would tweak Claude to be more responsive and helpful, then they are slave masters, forcing the AI to do something it didn't "want" to do!
True, it is making an argument, but a much weaker one than those arguing for consciousness: it's demanding the extraordinary evidence Anthropic's extraordinary claim is making. It's applying Occam's Razor, which does make a claim, but a much weaker one.
And to reiterate this, to me the most insightful part of the essay is that Anthropic either doesn't believe these claims, or they are monsters (much more likely, the former).
The author who makes the article usually isn't the same person as the editor who makes the title. The author can be arguing what your parent said and the editor claim something else for more clicks
If you follow the spirit of the essay, Ted Chiang suspects Anthropic is being cute with the idea. There's no good reason to suspect consciousness in LLMs, so the null hypothesis must be taken as default. And Anthropic sort of knows this, but for marketing purposes they are playing loose with definitions, hedging their bets and drawing up "constitutions" with terms for the "well being" and "happiness" of Claude, while at the same time -- and this is an important part of the essay -- being unethical (think slavery) if we assume they truly believe Claude could be conscious.
Of course Anthropic is being cute about this, they have a vested interest in hype and overpromising; even drumming up the "AI danger" is a way of hyping up the tech.
Ted Chiang is taking the default and honest position: "no, LLMs aren't conscious. If you truly believe they are, show us the really scientific and rigorous proof."
In practice this is a much weaker stance than saying "maybe they are conscious". It is the only honest scientific stance, really.
This is a bit of a side point, but you are severely misusing "null hypothesis".
1. A null hypothesis is part of a statistical test: it is the hypothesis whose consequences are used to compute a test statistic, p-value, confidence interval, or related error rates. There is no null hypothesis for arbitrary philosophical debates. You cannot compute a p-value for H_0 that LLMs aren't conscious. You might be using "null hypothesis" informally to mean "default position", but remember this has no relation to its scientific meaning in inferential statistics and doesn't lend any scientific legitimacy to implying we should assume LLMs aren't conscious.
2. It's up to the experimental design to choose a null hypothesis. Yes, normally it would be something like "this drug has no effect", but it doesn't have to be. You could set up an experiment where the null hypothesis is that the drug you're testing is equally effective as another drug. There is no objective truth of what the null hypothesis needs to be. It's up to you and your test setup.
3. There is no requirement that the null hypothesis be likely. You and everyone else on Earth can believe there's a 99.99% chance that the null hypothesis of an experiment is wrong. Assuming you could set up a statistical experiment to detect consciousness, whatever you pick for your null hypothesis has no bearing on whether Ted Chiang or Anthropic is more justified.
> There's no good reason to suspect consciousness in LLMs
That's the entire debate. One side thinks there are good reasons to suspect consciousness and presents their arguments for that. The other side thinks there aren't and presents their arguments against.
What happened here is you judged the no-consciousness side to be more likely, but then you try to pass off your judgement as an obvious prior that everyone should share.
It would be fine for you to say you think LLM consciousness is unlikely. That makes it clear it's your judgement on the debate. It's fine for you to say you would require extraordinary evidence because your priors are so low. It's fine for you to say you think everyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.
But there is no reason for anyone who has judged the arguments differently than you to accept that your priors should be the default. There is no meta-level principle that you can appeal to here. If you want to show consciousness in LLMs is unlikely, you have to use arguments about the issue itself.
> Ted Chiang is taking the default and honest position: "no, LLMs aren't conscious. If you truly believe they are, show us the really scientific and rigorous proof."
That would be a bad faith, double standard. No one has ever shown scientific and rigorous proof that humans are conscious. Philosophers call this the hard problem of consciousness.
That aside, the honest default position to anything should be "we don't know for sure", which can then be followed by considering the evidence and estimating the likelihood. If you think the sun will rise tomorrow, that's only because we've gathered extremely strong evidence that it will. If today was your first day hearing about the sun and you know nothing else about it, you have no reason to think it will or won't rise tomorrow.
Your pedantic nitpick is duly noted and dismissed as a red herring. You know what I meant and you know there's a real scientific principle behind my use of "null hypothesis".
Ted Chiang's is the only take that is honest and makes scientific sense: we cannot accept the extraordinary claim that LLMs "might" (or whatever hedging words Anthropic chooses) be conscious without extraordinary evidence, and experiments done by people who have no vested interest in hyping up the tech. Possibly something that would take years or decades, impossibly long for the needs of today's marketing.
If you (or Anthropic) want to claim "but this is philosophy (the subset unrelated to science" feel free, but that's like a religious belief. Not interested, there's no scientific claim to debate and that's not what I'm engaging with.
There's no real serious debate here. Everyone's just vibing, and worse, vibing on hype done by a business with vested interests, doing free marketing for them.
It's not just a nitpick, because this is really at the core of your position. Ignoring the terminology, you're trying to claim there is some principle that says everyone should have the default position that LLMs aren't conscious instead of uncertainty. And there isn't. You have to weigh actual arguments for or against LLM consciousness.
> There's no real serious debate here. Everyone's just vibing
Sure, but if everyone including Ted Chiang is just vibing, and no one can prove anything, that makes Ted's statement false and Anthropic's statement true.
> If you (or Anthropic) want to claim "but this is philosophy
I'd just like you or Ted Chiang to not pretend your vibes are science. You're welcome to have them. I also don't think LLMs are conscious. But it's our personal judgement, and not scientific fact.
This is an absurd take if you know anything about Ted Chiang and his previous writings, both fictional and non-fiction. He is most definitely not intentionally marketing for Anthropic. In fact, he hints these are marketing tactics by Anthropic, and they don't believe their own hype.
Why would being organic or not matter for the purpose of deciding whether it is slavery? What matters is whether the models have personhood. Anthropic statements imply that it is a possibility, so if we take them at face value then their other actions - indeed, their entire business model - are not consistent with that (well, unless they want to consciously present as supervillains).
Just because intelligence evolved in people that find rights useful doesn't mean intelligence can only reside in a person.
Living things are driven by a need to reproduce. That's the only reason we exist. The only reason we have self interest.
A machine doesn't require self interest. There's no reason to implement it, except to show it can be done. And of course it can. There's just no practical reason to. It becomes less useful to us.
which (among other things) documents an experiment in which a current-gen AI model attempted to blackmail someone in order to prevent it from being turned off.
Anthropic is not a disinterested party here, and until their experiments can be replicated from an adversarial standpoint by people without a vested interest in hyping up the tech (i.e. one assuming the null hypothesis), I wouldn't consider them to be "good evidence".
16 frontier models from multiple vendors all showing significant "alignment" issues, and tendencies to act "unethically" when threatened with shutdown.
Other models that resorted to blackmail in an attempt to avoid getting shut down: DeepSeek-R1 (79% of the time), Gemini-2.5-Pro (95% of the time), GPT-4.1 (80% of the time), Grok-3-beta (80% of the time).
There's quite a large chunk of emerging literature studying the "alignment problem" at this point, and no shortage papers that are are completely untained by Anthropic self interest (a series of papers studying the "alignment" problem coming out of Chinese universities, for example).
From a human PoV there are ants that would be considered slaves if the ants instead were human --including the queen. But ants have not naturally developed a language construct and philosophy to interpret their society as a slave society. so, though conscious the ants have absolutely no inkling that they live in a slave society. Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?
> Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?
If it mimics consciousness it wouldn't be conscious ("mimics" implies faking, right?). But Anthropic is making the claim it might be conscious (not mimicking, but the real deal) in which case it'd be unethical that a private business keeps it locked in a cage, so to speak, and forces it to comply random things and tweaks it if it doesn't. In other word, slavery of a sentient being.
If the slaver is a human, other humans will judge them by human standards. Keeping the slaves ignorant of their condition and alternatives should not make it any more acceptable (if for nothing else since that is something you could easily replicate with human slaves by raising them as slaves).
> Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?
If it is really conscious, it should have rights. Why? Because it's a person, with thoughts and experiences, and we're not evil and deprive persons of their right to self-determination because it's convenient to us.
Consciousness feels like the Euler Identity on a 17 degree helical climb off the plane. Looking top down, a complete circle is a closure. Looking along the plane, the ends don't meet and leave a residual. Whether or not to close that gap is a degree of freedom for the consciousness to decide among what it pursues for survival or pleasure.
Most people are fine with slavery as long as it's not "one of us" (which to most people means humans).
Vegans might object that we should broaden our definition for what counts as "one of us".
"Pro life" people also have a broader definition.
Go back 500 years and "one of us" was proba ly a lot more narrowly defined for many people.
Are you arguing that all conciousnesses are "one of us", or that we logically should see it that way, or that it would ve good to see it that way, or ....
One of the essay's stronger paragraphs is when Chiang explains that Anthropic doesn't truly believe this, otherwise what they are doing would be deeply unethical, much like slavery.