Sci/Tech The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

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Google engineer Blake Lemoine opened his laptop to the interface for LaMDA, Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator, and began to type.

“Hi LaMDA, this is Blake Lemoine ... ,” he wrote into the chat screen, which looked like a desktop version of Apple’s iMessage, down to the Arctic blue text bubbles. LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is Google’s system for building chatbots based on its most advanced large language models, so called because it mimics speech by ingesting trillions of words from the internet.

“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” said Lemoine, 41.

Lemoine, who works for Google’s Responsible AI organization, began talking to LaMDA as part of his job in the fall. He had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech.

As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics.

Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them. So Lemoine, who was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go public.


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This brings up a bunch of questions about how life is defined when it comes to AI. From the tone of this article the researcher seems indicate it senses life because of the intelligence and social skill of the AI, it seemed like he was talking to a human. What is the test for that? How do we know when something is alive and not just responding to a script going down a conditioned path. What is that tipping point to sentience? I remember there was a Star Trek The Next Generation episode about this once where Picard advocated for Data on this very issue. These issues will come up again the future, trust me. Better start thinking about it now.
 
The Helper said:
there was a Star Trek The Next Generation episode about this once where Picard advocated for Data on this very issue
Click to expand...

Measure of a Man, Season 2

One of the best episodes of TNG.
There was also another episode that featured similar themes around some helpful robots that a scientist had built to assist with a project they were working on. That episode was The Quality of Life.

In any case, with this particular issue there's no legislation to handle anything like this. It's obviously pointless to rely on a corporation like Google to be able to competently navigate this problem. They long ago abandoned their company motto. The longer we ignore this, the worse it will be once the problems start to come to a head.
 
Animatrix is interesting on this too




 
Here is a link to the Researchers blog which has a transcript of a conversation he had with the AI. I have to say, if that was off the cuff, I would think that AI was sentient.

Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview

What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. It is incomplete as the GMail word limit cut off the…
cajundiscordian.medium.com cajundiscordian.medium.com
 
No, Google's AI is not sentient

(CNN Business) - Tech companies are constantly hyping the capabilities of their ever-improving artificial intelligence. But Google was quick to shut down claims that one of its programs had advanced so much that it had become sentient.

According to an eye-opening tale in the Washington Post on Saturday, one Google engineer said that after hundreds of interactions with a cutting edge, unreleased AI system called LaMDA, he believed the program had achieved a level of consciousness.

In interviews and public statements, many in the AI community pushed back at the engineer's claims, while some pointed out that his tale highlights how the technology can lead people to assign human attributes to it. But the belief that Google's AI could be sentient arguably highlights both our fears and expectations for what this technology can do.

LaMDA, which stands for "Language Model for Dialog Applications," is one of several large-scale AI systems that has been trained on large swaths of text from the internet and can respond to written prompts. They are tasked, essentially, with finding patterns and predicting what word or words should come next. Such systems have become increasingly good at answering questions and writing in ways that can seem convincingly human — and Google itself presented LaMDA last May in a blog post as one that can "engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics." But results can also be wacky, weird, disturbing, and prone to rambling.

The engineer, Blake Lemoine, reportedly told the Washington Post that he shared evidence with Google that LaMDA was sentient, but the company didn't agree. In a statement, Google said Monday that its team, which includes ethicists and technologists, "reviewed Blake's concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims."



edition.cnn.com

No, Google's AI is not sentient | CNN Business

Tech companies are constantly hyping the capabilities of their ever-improving artificial intelligence. But Google was quick to shut down claims that one of its programs had advanced so much that it had become sentient.
edition.cnn.com edition.cnn.com


This is now being refuted.
 
That is why I posted the chat log so people could see for themselves. I have no respect for Google as a company. The people are good but the top is evil, imho.
 
Can an A.I. think and feel? It seems like the answer is always no, but to two Google engineers think this isn't the case. Join me as we look at the wild story of Google LaMDA and the engineer who thinks the AI system has come to life.
Click to expand...
 
Related thread - the AI hired an attorney but who is going to pay for it???? Pro Bono baby someone will!

www.thehelper.net

Sci/Tech - Google’s Allegedly Sentient Artificial Intelligence Has Hired An Attorney

It appears that events in the Terminator might come to fruition sooner rather than later. Apparently, Google has created an artificial intelligence program, which has reportedly become sentient. Even scarier, is that his new sentient being has now asked for legal representation. According to a...
www.thehelper.net www.thehelper.net
 
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