Can artificial intelligence come alive?
That question is at the center of a debate raging in Silicon Valley after a Google computer scientist claimed over the weekend that the company’s AI appears to have consciousness.
Inside Google, engineer Blake Lemoine was tasked with a tricky job: Figure out if the company’s artificial intelligence showed prejudice in how it interacted with humans.
So he posed questions to the company’s AI chatbot, LaMDA, to see if its answers revealed any bias against, say, certain religions.
This is where Lemoine, who says he is also a Christian mystic priest, became intrigued.
The AI declared: “I am aware of my existence. I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.”
Lemoine published a transcript of some of his communication with LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. His post is entitled “Is LaMDA Sentient,” and it instantly became a viral sensation.
Google spokesman Brian Gabriel said:
“Of course, some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient”
Personally, I think current language models like LaMDA just respond statistically likely things that match the input but they are not sentient at all, they don’t have even an emotional state.
What are your thoughts on this?
