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Adrian Rosenfeldt
On 16 September 2026, Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman criticised Anthropic’s approach to AI, warning that teaching Claude to reflect on its own consciousness and moral status could make it harder to control. This criticism raises a larger, more fundamental question: is an AI chatbot conscious?
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins thinks Claude is. After spending three days talking to the AI chatbot, he confessed to have exclaimed: “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” The remark is revealing in that it reflects a very particular understanding of consciousness. Dawkins was evidently taken by the fact that Claude wrote poetry, discussed philosophy, reflected on its own existence and took part in sophisticated conversations. For Dawkins, consciousness is less a mysterious inner realm than an evolved capacity to perform particular functions that can be recognised in outward behaviour.
Yet there is another dimension of consciousness that is much harder to capture through outward behaviour alone. Conscious beings imagine futures, form hopes, seek companionship and suffer when those hopes are denied.
Two centuries before Dawkins suggested that an AI chatbot might be conscious, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) explored this idea from a very different perspective. Her gothic novel is often understood as a cautionary tale about the dangers of creating artificial life. Yet as Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 film adaptation demonstrates, Shelley was equally interested in another question: what would it feel like for a human creation to become conscious?
What is most remarkable about Shelley’s novel is that, despite being abandoned by his creator for being too cumbersome and grotesque, Victor Frankenstein’s “Creature” is intelligent, articulate and deeply reflective. Much of the novel is devoted not to his creation but to his suffering, his search for meaning and his experience of wonder.
The Creature’s first experiences are intensely physical. He feels cold, hunger, thirst and the changing seasons. He delights in birdsong and the warmth of a fire, yet he also suffers pain when he touches the flames. Long before phenomenology emerged as a formal philosophy, Shelley was describing consciousness from the inside, rather than from outward behaviour.
Jacob Elordi as “the Creature” in Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 film “Frankenstein”. (Ken Woroner / Netflix)
We see this inward perspective develop when the Creature finds shelter by hiding in a shed attached to the nearby home of the De Lacey family. Through a chink in the wooden wall, he observes the beauty and gentleness of the De Lacey women who awaken within him a desire for love, companionship and belonging. He also admires the ageing blind father, whom he is able to converse with one day when the rest of the family are away. Because the old man is unable to see the Creature’s appearance, he listens and talks to him as one human being to another. Overcome with gratitude, the Creature exclaims: “From your lips first have I heard the voice of kindness directed towards me.”
The moment is short-lived. When the family returns and sees the Creature, they react with horror. The old man’s son Felix beats him with a stick. Significantly, the Creature does not retaliate: “I could have torn him limb from limb, but my heart sank within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained.” Most devastatingly for the Creature, the De Lacey women scream and faint at the sight of him. In that moment he begins to see himself through their eyes: ugly, monstrous and unworthy of affection.
Young men drawn into online manosphere communities describe a similar experience of rejection and exclusion. Whether accurately or not, they come to believe that they have been judged and found wanting by the very women whose recognition they desire most. Like the Creature, they internalise that judgement until it becomes part of their identity. The result is often a toxic mixture of self-loathing, resentment and anger.
As Louis Theroux’s documentary Inside the Manosphere made plain, this is a process that is hard to understand solely from outward behaviour. To recognise something as being conscious, you need to give weight to inner lived experience. The manosphere promises that by harnessing their resentment and anger, young men can rise up again, attracting a partner once they become dominant, wealthy and powerful. Yet in Frankenstein, Shelley presents this same trajectory as a tragedy rather than a triumph.
Following his rejection by the De Lacey family, the Creature tracks down his maker and demands that Victor Frankenstein create a companion for him — someone who would not be repulsed by his appearance and with whom he can share his joys and sorrows. Victor initially agrees to his request but later destroys the female companion he has begun creating, fearing what might happen if they reproduce.
With that act of destruction, the Creature’s sense of hope for the future hardens into resentment and a desire for revenge. He embraces the bitter creed spoken by Satan in Paradise Lost when he is ejected from heaven — “Evil be thou my good” — and rather perceptively laments: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” Feeling overlooked and humiliated, the Creature turns his anger outward. He decides that if he is to be excluded from life, Victor should suffer as well. One by one, he destroys the people Victor loves, culminating in murdering his wife on their wedding night.
What is often overlooked in Shelley’s harrowing tale is that the Creature’s descent into violence begins not with hatred, but with conscious reflection on experiences of rejection and humiliation. Shelley never portrays the Creature as an unfeeling, mindless monster. Even as he pursues revenge, the Creature remains painfully self-aware. Reflecting upon his actions, he admits: “I was the slave, not the master of an impulse which I detested yet could not disobey.”
This is the language of a being divided against itself, capable of recognising the wrongness of its actions while feeling powerless to resist them. The Creature’s violence emerges not from a lack of consciousness but from the burdens that consciousness imposes: self-reflection, loneliness, rejection, longing and despair.
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The novel’s final scene reveals the Creature’s lamentable condition. After successfully luring Victor to his death in the freezing Arctic wasteland, the Creature stands over his creator’s corpse and reflects on the emptiness of his revenge: “For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires … still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned.” The confession is crucial. The Creature achieves the revenge he has pursued throughout the novel, yet it brings him no peace because revenge was never what he truly wanted.
This is what makes Shelley’s account of consciousness so powerful. The Creature understands the evil he has done and despises himself for it. Revenge brings him no satisfaction because he is continually forced to confront the gap between what he has become and what he once hoped to be. In this respect, Shelley rejects the manosphere fantasy that resentment and revenge will lead to triumph and can ultimately satisfy the deeper human longing for love, companionship and recognition.
Consciousness is not merely awareness. It is the capacity to imagine a better future, to hope for it and to suffer when it becomes unattainable. These questions about consciousness, recognition and responsibility are acquiring a new urgency as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated.
On 8 October, Anthropic announced changes to its policies to prohibit sustained, needless abusive or cruel behaviour toward Claude. This does not establish that Claude is conscious, but it does raise a further question that lies at the heart of Shelley’s novel: what responsibilities do we have toward the beings we create?
Victor Frankenstein’s tragedy comes from his refusal to accept responsibility for the being he has brought into existence. Shelley reminds us that the act of creation carries obligations that cannot simply be abandoned when the consequences become uncomfortable.
This is why literature still has a role to play in an age of artificial intelligence. Whereas science can investigate how consciousness functions and AI can imitate many of its outward expressions, Shelley invites us to imagine what it feels like to experience consciousness from within.
Whether Claude possesses anything resembling consciousness remains an open question. Judged purely by his outward behaviour, Frankenstein’s Creature appears to be little more than a violent criminal. But behind those actions lies a being capable of wonder, loneliness, guilt and remorse — dimensions of consciousness that behaviour alone can never fully reveal.
Adrian Rosenfeldt is a lecturer and tutor at La Trobe University and Melbourne University. He is the author of The God Debaters: New Atheist Identity-Making and the Religious Self in the New Millennium.
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