Has Google’s AI LaMDA Come to Life?

There has been an interesting turn of events with Google’s engineer Blake Lemoine. He interacts with LaMDA which is Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator. LaMDA is an abbreviation of Language Model for Dialogue Applications which is developed by Google for acting as a chatbot.

This mimics speech by ingesting trillions of words from the internet. As per Blake Lemoine he felt like “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”. As mentioned, before it was the duty of Lemoine to speak with the LaMDA and to check whether the AI designed uses discriminatory or hate speech.

Talking With LaMDA

With his interaction with LaMDA about religion, it was noticed by the Engineer that the chatbot was beginning to talk about its rights and personhood. After the incident, he decided to investigate further. In a different interaction, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s opinion regarding Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics.

Lemoine decided to go public after this incident. To quote his words in an interaction he said “I think this technology is going to be amazing. I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But maybe other people disagree and maybe we at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices.”

This is not the first time that an Engineer has experienced this. It is believed by some experts that AI is not far off from achieving consciousness.

Is LaMDA Sentient?

This sort of claim can not be considered to be ironclad proof of such a big thing. However, Aguera y Arcas, a writer in the Economist mentioned a few snippets about his conversation with LaMDA and mentioned something similar. As per him, he felt like he was speaking with a human.

 The spokesperson of Google has denied any such claims. This could be the case however, due to high data and intelligent programming the AI has sounded like a human in a certain incident. 

Reality vs Science Fiction

The concept of a sentient Robot has inspired several science fictionists for decades. It has been pointed out by several academics, experts, and AI practitioners that what LaMDA has depicted or shown is available at several corners of the internet and it is not surprising, and it does not mean that the AI understands the meaning.

The LaMDA has been designed to collect data from the internet along with the self-learning feature. This could be the neurolinguistics of the concerned playing with them.

Google’s dignified spokesperson Gabriel depicted that “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. These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences and can riff on any fantastical topic.”

Conclusion

The turn of events encountered by Blake Lemoine is interesting as they sound but there has been no proof of LaMDA getting sentient.

Source: Has Google’s AI LaMDA Come to Life?