The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life...

[DGUtley]

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 knowphysics,” 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.

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[MisterVeritis]

This may be the most serious issue of our time. Google is creating life.

[Ethereal]

These results are largely meaningless until the observer bias is removed from the equation. I would bet good money that this so-called "sentient" AI would fall apart under minimal scrutiny from independent testers and observers.

[Chris]

Google's AI is not sentient. Not even slightly explains what I initially thought. Google's AI is noting more than a sophisticated ELIZA.

...Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent. All they do is match patterns, drawn from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean that these systems are sentient. Which doesn’t mean that human beings can’t be taken in. In our book Rebooting AI, Ernie Davis and I called this human tendency to be suckered by The Gullibility Gap — a pernicious, modern version of pareidolia, the anthromorphic bias that allows humans to see Mother Theresa in an image of a cinnamon bun. Indeed, someone well-known at Google, Blake LeMoine, originally charged with studying how “safe” the system is, appears to have fallen in love with LaMDA, as if it were a family member or a colleague. (Newsflash: it’s not; it’s a spreadsheet for words.)

[carolina73]

AI does not think. Humans thoughts are not always logical.

Blake the engineer has been watching too much Star Trek.

[MisterVeritis]

I think we are all going to be surprised by this.