Btw. The inventor of RSS 2.0 has been entering similar Dawkinsian terrain:
https://social.vivaldi.net/@ianbetteridge/116522439483754901
FWIW Instead of being ND or not, I think the propensity to see and believe LLMs to be "active minds" or "new forms of consciousness" runs along different axes, including that we're evolutionary geared towards a tendency to see minds everywhere (being more cautious, even with a lot of false positives, meant better survival chances, but for LLMs it feels the inverse is just as important 🤷♂️).
Then, there are also these factors:<li>LLMs are (still?) complete black-box functions (even if introspectable by experts, they're not fully understood, and for normal users probably the closest to "magic" post-modernism ever got to)</li><li>The mistake of considering language as direct proxy for minds, amplified by the turn-based interaction/conversational pattern imposed by LLM UIs (starting with ELIZA). Growing context windows and larger potential/scale of variability of answers have amplified that effect even further (and therefore also lowered the threshold of believability for some susceptible people).</li><li>A ton of anthropomorphic design choices (dark patterns?) at different layers, e.g. default use of first person voice & conversational/empathetic tone, system prompts to nudge the model output to sound more human & sycophantic... These all are intentional decisions by the model providers! </li>
Also important: Most users NEVER encounter the models during training and generally have no clue (or even interest!) about the incredible amount of human effort required to filter, curate, transform, massage & fine-tune inputs, training data and outputs to reduce the amount of public failure modes.
I've been working with generative art/design processes for ~30 years and know from own experience that the human input/effort (but also our intent) and curation of these systems is the most valuable aspect of this way of working... Even deeply appreciating the sometimes truly "magic" moments of serendipity in the generated outputs, has never made me doubt even once my own agency involved in the process, or to start assigning these systems a form of consciousness, neural networks and genetic programming included...
Lastly, I think Dawkins is a special case, exactly because for decades he's been extremely vocal about the delusion of religion and religious tendencies of people, only to succumb to the lure of LLMs himself... There's a bittersweet irony alone in that!
