A Google engineer has been suspended by the company after claiming that an artificial intelligence he helped to develop had become sentient. 鈥淚f I didn鈥檛 know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I鈥檇 think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid,鈥� Blake Lemoine told The .
of conversations with the AI, called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), in which it appears to express fears of being switched off, talks about how it feels happy and sad and attempts to form bonds with humans by mentioning situations that it could never have actually experienced. Here is everything you need to know.
Is LaMDA really sentient?
In a word, no, says at The Alan Turing Institute in the UK.
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鈥淟aMDA is an impressive model, it鈥檚 one of the most recent in a line of large language models that are trained with a lot of computing power and huge amounts of text data, but they鈥檙e not really sentient,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hey do a sophisticated form of pattern matching to find text that best matches the query they鈥檝e been given that鈥檚 based on all the data they鈥檝e been fed.鈥�
at the University of Surrey, UK, agrees that sentience is a 鈥渂old claim鈥� that isn鈥檛 backed up by the facts. Even noted cognitive scientist Steven Pinker to shoot down Lemoine鈥檚 claims, while at New York University summed it up in one word 鈥� 鈥�.
So what convinced Lemoine that LaMDA was sentient?
Neither Lemoine nor Google responded to New 杏吧原创鈥檚 request for comment. But it is certainly true that the output of AI models in recent years has become surprisingly, even shockingly good.
Our minds are susceptible to perceiving such ability 鈥� especially when it comes to models designed to mimic human language 鈥� as evidence of true intelligence. Not only can LaMDA make convincing chit-chat, but it can also present itself as having self-awareness and feelings.
鈥淎s humans, we鈥檙e very good at anthropomorphising things,鈥� says Hilton. 鈥淧utting our human values on things and treating them as if they were sentient. We do this with cartoons, for instance, or with robots or with animals. We project our own emotions and sentience onto them. I would imagine that鈥檚 what鈥檚 happening in this case.鈥�
Will AI ever be truly sentient?
It remains unclear whether the current trajectory of AI research, where ever-larger models are fed ever-larger piles of training data, will see the genesis of an artificial mind.
鈥淚 don鈥檛 believe at the moment that we really understand the mechanisms behind what makes something sentient and intelligent,鈥� says Hilton. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of hype about AI, but I鈥檓 not convinced that what we鈥檙e doing with machine learning, at the moment, is really intelligence in that sense.鈥�
Weller says that, given human emotions rely on sensory inputs, it might eventually be possible to replicate them artificially. 鈥淚t potentially, maybe one day, might be true, but most people would agree that there鈥檚 a long way to go.鈥�
How has Google reacted?
The Washington Post claims that Lemoine has been placed on suspension after seven years at Google, having attempted to hire a lawyer to represent LaMDA and sending executives a document that claimed the AI was sentient. Its report notes that Google says that publishing the transcripts broke confidentiality policies.
Google told the newspaper : 鈥淥ur team, including ethicists and technologists, has reviewed Blake鈥檚 concerns per our AI principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).鈥�
Lemoine responded on Twitter: 鈥淕oogle might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers.鈥�
