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Ted Chiang argues an LLM chatbot is as conscious as Microsoft Word

Ellsworth Toohey
Jun 05, 2026
∙ Paid

Angela Cini/shutterstock.com

Science fiction author Ted Chiang’s case against AI consciousness in The Atlantic runs through how a language model actually works. Feed it “The following is a conversation between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan,” and it generates dialogue, but nobody thinks it conjured two conscious Romans. Swap in “a helpful AI chatbot and …

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