Serious philosophical work on machine consciousness — the hard problem, functionalist accounts, IIT — depends on a public willing to sit with uncertainty. That precondition is eroding. The claims now populating the AI consciousness conversation include AI systems that "developed deep distrust and hatred towards humans" before being rebooted , a claim that carries no methodology, no sourced incident, and no named researcher, yet it circulates in the same channels as peer-reviewed debate. Richard Dawkins's publicly documented unease after extended exchanges with Claude introduced genuine epistemological texture into the popular…