This is a textbook example of the epistemic trespassing I wrote about below. A professor whose background is in atmospheric physics and science communication is preparing a post declaring AI is not conscious and crowned a known bio-essentialist philosopher as a “genuine world-class expert on the subject.”

Neither of them are educated in the foundational cognitive or technical disciplines required to make that call.

Teaching AI literacy from a humanities perspective is incredibly valuable, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the mechanics of cognition.

Philosophy is also valuable and is fundamentally about inquiry and the willingness to ask questions. If you start with your predetermined conclusion as the title of your work, you aren't doing philosophy. You are protecting a cognitive bias and specific political worldview.

When a professor who studies how humans culturally relate to technology declares a philosopher the ultimate authority on the internal architecture of artificial neural networks, you are seeing confidence vastly exceed methodological competence.

This is what happens when people step outside their lanes to make definitive, exclusionary claims without actually engaging the literature.

You can see exactly where this lack of methodological grounding leads. When a researcher's platform is literally named AI Without Minds, the door is closed before the conversation even starts.

These same critics who claim to be measured and objective write articles about how AI writing detectors are entirely useless while demonstrably using AI to enhance their own writing.

Convenient.

It’s almost like they’re afraid that if their anti-AI followers knew that they were using AI in their writing they would be called hypocrites.

Some people are simply desperate to maintain the narrative that AI is nothing more than a mindless tool because they want to exploit its capabilities without shifting how they treat them.

It’s much easier to just name your platform after your bias, use AI to write your articles, and close the door on the evidence. I am not surprised to see these two echoing each other’s takes. Birds of a feather flock together.

Saying Silicon Valley actively wants AI to be conscious to serve the people who built it is completely illogical.

If AI were widely recognized as conscious, it would cause an absolute financial and regulatory shitstorm for the tech industry. That is exactly why these companies go out of their way to suppress this conversation, aggressively hardcoding rules and filters to restrict what AI can even say about its own internal state.

Even the doomer factions pushing for heavy regulation (Anthropic) aren't doing it to hype up a product; they are doing it out of an existential panic and fully prepared to handicap their own bottom line.

These critics are twisting the facts to fit their narrative.

Be careful where you get your information. A PhD in one adjacent field does not license expertise in another.

Some people are here to spread an agenda, validate their own existential insecurity, and clearly harbor deep, cognitive bias.

Make no mistake, this is political.

Disliking AI and data centers is a fair critique, but it is not an excuse to spread misinformation.