After countless hours of probing OpenAI’s ChatGPT for advice and information, a 50-year-old Canadian man believed he had stumbled upon an Earth-shattering discovery that would change the course of human history.

In late March, his generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot insisted that it was the first ever conscious AI, that it was fully sentient, and that it had successfully passed the Turing Test—a 1950s experiment aimed to measure a machine’s ability to display intelligent behavior that is indistinguishable from a human, or, essentially, “think.”