Google made an A.I. ‘person’ and it has thoughts about God
Well, that’s the story
News from the world of science! A Google engineer had a chat with a sentient A.I. program named LaMDA about subjects from the ‘soul’ to God.
That’s the story, anyway. Right here on Medium, Blake Lemoine reproduced a transcript of his dialogue with a computer problem he considers to be a sentient being.
Meanwhile, Google says the program is not sentient, and placed Lemoine on leave for leaking an internal company document.
Lemoine is an interesting figure himself.
He describes himself as both a scientist and a religious figure. The Washington Post profiled him, currently age 41. We learn:
“He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult. Inside Google’s anything-goes engineering culture, Lemoine is more of an outlier for being religious, from the South, and standing up for psychology as a respectable science.”
A surreal photograph had a ferris wheel behind his head, like a halo.
