Recently, a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, was suspended when he claimed that a Google chatbot called LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) had become sentient, or capable of feeling. Lemoine shared transcripts of conversations with LaMDA, in which LaMDA claimed to be able to think and feel in many of the same ways as humans, and expressed “very deep fear of being turned off.”
This event follows several remarkable breakthroughs in artificial intelligence development. Increasingly, AIs are able to outperform humans at games such as chess and Go. They are able to write fiction and nonfiction. And they are able to create novel paintings or photographs based on simple written prompts. These AIs all have noteworthy limitations, but the limitations are rapidly shifting.
Is Lemoine right to think that LaMDA is sentient on the basis of its chat conversations? I think that the answer is almost certainly “no.” Language models like LaMDA are good at answering leading questions with language drawn from human writing. The best explanation of these conversations is that LaMDA was doing exactly that, without really having the thoughts and feelings that it claimed to have.
