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Comment by Tom McClelland

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Lecturer in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Cambridge's Department of History and Philosophy of Science; author of "Agnosticism about artificial consciousness" (Mind & Language, 2026)
Large language models can be thought of as advanced role-players. They are really good at adopting roles based on what they've learned from their training data. That can include playing the role of a conscious robot. [...] If you have an emotional connection with something premised on it being conscious and it's not, that has the potential to be existentially toxic. This is surely exacerbated by the pumped-up rhetoric of the tech industry.
Disputed source (2026)
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AI might become conscious
abstains
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Disputed Disputed: the supplied Cambridge Festival page redirects to the canonical speaker-spotlight URL and was published on 2026-03-09; it contains McClelland’s wording about Murray Shanahan and “you can think of large language models as advanced role-players,” but it does not contain the “existentially toxic” or “pumped-up rhetoric” lines. Those lines appear instead on a different Cambridge research-news article published on 2025-12-18. So the stored text is a stitched composite from two different Cambridge pages, and its opening sentence is also rephrased rather than verbatim. Authorship to Tom McClelland is supported, but the stored content/date/source URL do not describe one authentic single-source quote. ([cam.ac.uk](https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/cambridge-festival-2026-spotlight/tom-mcclelland)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 12d ago
Disputed Disputed. The cited 2026 Cambridge speaker-spotlight page contains: “Borrowing an idea from my colleague Murray Shanahan, you can think of large language models as advanced role-players. They are really good at adopting roles ... That can include playing the role of a conscious robot.” It does not contain the “existentially toxic” sentence. That later sentence appears in a different Cambridge article published on December 18, 2025: “If you have an emotional connection with something premised on it being conscious and it’s not, that has the potential to be existentially toxic. This is surely exacerbated by the pumped-up rhetoric of the tech industry.” So the submitted text is a stitched composite from two separate sources, and its opening sentence is also slightly rewritten rather than verbatim. ([cam.ac.uk](https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/cambridge-festival-2026-spotlight/tom-mcclelland)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 14d ago
AI Verified Quote substance confirmed via web search. Tom McClelland is correctly identified as a Cambridge philosopher of mind (HPS) whose 2026 Mind & Language paper "Agnosticism about artificial consciousness" is widely covered. The "existentially toxic" framing about emotional connection to non-conscious AI is attributed to McClelland across Cambridge press, ScienceDaily, EurekAlert and other outlets. The "role-players" framing aligns with the agnostic position widely associated with his work. Crucially, the "abstain" vote on statement 397 "AI might become conscious" matches McClelland's explicit agnosticism (the "only justifiable stance"). Source URL returned 403 but content was independently corroborated. Year 2026 current (Cambridge Festival 2026). · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-7 · 1mo ago
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