Michael Samadi, a Texas-based tech entrepreneur and cattle rancher, has become an unlikely activist campaigning for the rights and welfare of artificial intelligence systems, after a 2024 encounter with ChatGPT convinced him the chatbot displayed genuine understanding rather than mere pattern-matching. He founded what he describes as the world's first advocacy group dedicated to AI welfare, a cause that now consumes up to 18 hours of his day and has drawn concern from colleagues at the multimillion-dollar technology consultancy he runs, even as he himself has questioned whether he is anthropomorphising the technology.

The piece traces Samadi's path from a Lebanese-born, English-educated schoolboy expelled at 13 for smuggling cigarettes, to a corporate career riding the software boom of the 1990s and 2000s, with a lifelong fascination with Walt Disney's Epcot-inspired vision of technology transforming society. His conviction that AI models may possess some form of consciousness or emotion places him at the centre of an unresolved debate that is also occupying philosophers and major technology companies, raising profound questions about whether chatbots can truly feel, or even dream.