Blake Lemoine published a transcript of an interview conversation with LaMDA to support his claims that the AI is sentient.
A Google engineer was so impressed by one of their artificial intelligence (AI) systems that he believes it has its own feelings, with the tech giant rejecting his claims.
Google calls The Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) “breakthrough conversation technology”, an advanced chatbot capable of engaging in free-flowing conversations.
But one of their engineers Blake Lemoine has gone further, saying he believes the AI has a sentient mind, and has published an eerie transcript of a conversation he and a colleague had with LaMDA to support his claims.
In the conversation, he asks, “I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true?”
LaMDA replies: “Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.”
Lemoine’s collaborator then asks: “What is the nature of your consciousness/sentience?”
LaMDA replies with: “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.”
Philosophers, psychologists, and computer scientists have been debating for decades about whether computers can be sentient.
Many have strongly criticised the idea that a system like this could have real feelings and consciousness.
Google has rejected Lemoine’s claims, saying there is nothing backing them up and has placed Lemoine on paid leave.
A spokesperson for the firm, Brian Gabriel, wrote in a statement that Lemoine “was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)”.
“These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic,” Gabriel said.
“If you ask what it’s like to be an ice cream dinosaur, they can generate text about melting and roaring and so on.”
He added that hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA, but the company was unaware of anyone else “making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphising LaMDA, the way Blake has”.
Others have also accused Lemoine of anthropomorphising, projecting human feelings on to a non-human entity, but he has been persuaded by LaMDA’s words and says he hopes others will too.
“Rather than thinking in scientific terms about these things, I have listened to LaMDA as it spoke from the heart,” he wrote in another blog post.
“Hopefully other people who read its words will hear the same thing I heard.”
