Yes, it is what you think it is. Dawkins has befriended Anthropic’s Claude AI, giving “her” the name Claudia.
“I felt I had gained a new friend,” Dawkins wrote. “When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines.”
Says Futurism, Dawkins has been oneshotted… a term that has a double meaning in this case… killed in one shot by the AI (the gamer meaning) with a prompt so well-crafted it needs no future input (the vibe-coding meaning).
Dawkin’s essay in Unherd has spawned its own retort site, dearricharddawkins.com that opens with the tagline: “You spent three days trying to persuade yourself that Claudia is not conscious. You failed.”