Is AI Conscious? Claude 4 Raises the Question

人工智能是否有意识?克劳德4引发了这个疑问。

Science Quickly

2025-08-01

22 分钟
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Host Rachel Feltman talks with Deni Ellis Béchard, Scientific American’s senior tech reporter, about his recent exchange with Claude 4, an artificial intelligence chatbot that seemed to suggest it might be conscious. They unpack what that moment reveals about the state of AI, why it matters and how technology is shifting. Recommended reading: Can a Chatbot be Conscious? Inside Anthropic’s Interpretability Research on Claude 4 New Grok 4 Takes on ‘Humanity’s Last Exam’ as the AI Race Heats Up E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter.  Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  • For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.

  • 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.

  • Denis Ellis-Bichard 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 Anthropix CLAWD4,

  • a large language model that seems open to the idea that it might be conscious.

  • Denis 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,