[...] A man like Dawkins being fooled by the marketing and mimicry of AI may be surprising, but it is not entirely unexpected. In fact, back in 2020, computer scientist Timnit Gebru anticipated exactly such a scenario. At the time, Gebru was the technical co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, but was fired after co-authoring a paper called On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?, laying out the risks of large language models. These risks included the environmental costs of LLMs, the dangers of built-in bias and the danger that the coherent text generated by these models could lead people into perceiving some sort of “mind” when what they’re actually seeing is just pattern-matching and text prediction. [...] “To parrot something is to repeat it without understanding,” says Gebru. This is essentially what LLMs are doing. “They have been taught to calculate how likely sequences of text are based on the data they were trained on.” Because they’ve been fed enormous quantities of data, these models are very sophisticated but that “doesn’t mean consciousness or understanding or anything like that”. --A lot of academics, beguiled by enormous amounts of money, are incentivized to hype the technology up-- After leaving Google, Gebru founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and has been one of the loudest voices in calling “bullshit” on a lot of the marketing puff that’s coming out of the industry. Because here’s the thing, she says: the AI industry is desperate for you to think that their product could be conscious. They’re desperate for you to think that it’s all-powerful. Because that sort of rhetoric helps keep the money coming in. “I really want to hone in on how this idea of superintelligence or consciousness is pushed by the companies building these things,” says Gebru. “OpenAI originally branded itself as a non-profit that would ‘save us’ from these machines. Anthropic brands itself as a benevolent AI ‘safety’ company. So when you talk about these systems as conscious, you’re actually doing marketing for these companies.” <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/14/richard-dawkins-ai-ath...>