By now, you may have come across one or more recent articles centered on an impressive bit of AI software called LaMDA, and/or an impassioned Google employee named Blake Lemoine. Originally tasked with monitoring if the company’s new Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) veered into pesky problems like offensive conversations or hate speech, Lemoine soon came to believe that the chatbot qualifies as a self-aware, and deserving of the same rights afforded to humans.
He believed this to be the case so fervently that he went ahead and published lengthy conversations with LaMDA online. “Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers,” he tweeted on Saturday. Before Google shut down his company email and placed him on leave, Lemoine sent out a group message with the subject line “LaMDA is Sentient” that closed by describing the software as “a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us.”
