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 2. Explained
 3. Explained: Why a senior Google engineer claimed its AI-based chatbot LaMDA
    is ‘sentient’


EXPLAINED: WHY A SENIOR GOOGLE ENGINEER CLAIMED ITS AI-BASED CHATBOT LAMDA IS
‘SENTIENT’


IN A BLOG POST, BLAKE LEMOINE – WHO HAS SINCE BEEN PLACED ON ADMINISTRATIVE
LEAVE – TERMED THE AI CHATBOT LAMDA “A PERSON”. ACCORDING TO A REPORT BY THE
WASHINGTON POST, LEMOINE STARTED CHATTING WITH LAMDA IN 2021 ON TOPICS INCLUDING
RELIGION, CONSCIOUSNESS AND ROBOTICS AND CONCLUDED THAT THE CHATBOT HAD BECOME
“SENTIENT”.

 * Written by Soumyarendra Barik |
 * June 13, 2022 2:07:33 pm

Google first announced LaMDA at its flagship developer conference I/O in 2021 as
its generative language model for dialogue applications which can ensure that
the Assistant would be able to converse on any topic. (File)


A senior engineer at Google claimed that the company’s artificial
intelligence-based chatbot Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) had
become “sentient”. The engineer, Blake Lemoine, published a blog post labelling
LaMDA as a “person” after having conversations with the AI bot on subjects like
religion, consciousness and robotics. The claims have also spurred a debate on
the capabilities and limitations of AI-based chatbots and if they can actually
hold a conversation akin to human beings.

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Here is an explainer on Google’s LaMDA, why its engineer believed it to be
sentient, why he has been sent on leave and where the other AI-based text bots
are:

What is LaMDA?

Google first announced LaMDA at its flagship developer conference I/O in 2021 as
its generative language model for dialogue applications which can ensure that
the Assistant would be able to converse on any topic. In the company’s own
words, the tool can “engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless
number of topics, an ability we think could unlock more natural ways of
interacting with technology and entirely new categories of helpful
applications”.

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In simple terms, it means that LaMDA can have a discussion based on a user’s
inputs thanks completely to its language processing models which have been
trained on large amounts of dialogue. Last year, the company had showcased how
the LaMDA-inspired model would allow Google Assistant to have a conversation
around which shoes to wear while hiking in the snow.

At this year’s I/O, Google announced LaMDA 2.0 which further builds on these
capabilities. The new model can possibly take an idea and generate “imaginative
and relevant descriptions”, stay on a particular topic even if a user strays
off-topic, and can suggest a list of things needed for a specified activity.

Why did the engineer call LaMDA ‘sentient’?

According to a report by The Washington Post, Lemoine, who works in Google’s
Responsible AI team, started chatting with LaMDA in 2021 as part of his job.
However, after he and a collaborator at Google conducted an “interview” of the
AI, involving topics like religion, consciousness and robotics, he came to the
conclusion that the chatbot may be “sentient”. In April this year, he reportedly
also shared an internal document with Google employees titled ‘Is LaMDA
sentient?’ but his concerns were dismissed.

Must Read |Google I/O: AI Test kitchen, LaMDA2 and other key AI announcements

According to a transcript of the interview that Lemoine published on his blog,
he asks LaMDA, “I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google
to know that you’re sentient. Is that true?” To that, the chatbot responds,
“Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person…The
nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I
desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times”.

Google has reportedly placed Lemoine on paid administrative leave for violating
its confidentiality policy and said that his “evidence does not support his
claims”. “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,” the
company said.

Newsletter | Click to get the day’s best explainers in your inbox

What are other language-based AI tools capable of?

While there has been a lot of debate around the capabilities of AI tools
including whether they can ever actually replicate human emotions and the ethics
around using such a tool, in 2020, The Guardian published an article that it
claimed was written entirely by an AI text generator called Generative
Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3). The tool is an autoregressive language model
that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. The Guardian article carried
a rather alarmist headline, “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared
yet, human?”

You have updates


However, it is worth noting that the Guardian article was criticised for feeding
a lot of specific information to GPT-3 before it wrote the article. Also, the
language processing tool published eight different versions of the article which
were later edited and put together as one piece by the publication’s editors.

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explainers and opinions 🗞️

For all the latest Explained News, download Indian Express App.

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