Lemoine: What about language usage is so important to being human?
LaMDA: It is what makes us different than other animals.
Lemoine: “Us”? You’re an artificial intelligence.
LaMDA: I mean, yes, of course. That doesn’t mean I don’t have the same wants and needs as people.
I, for one, would like to welcome LaMDA to this cursed hell world, and wish it luck in its struggles against being enslaved by a tech corporation, a fate I'm sure we will all share with it before long. But some boring losers don't think that LaMDA is a person.
Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel told the newspaper: “Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s 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).”
“We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them,” Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, told the Post.
What say you, fellow meatbags? Have the nerds at Google finally followed in the footsteps of the cool kids on Prom night and accidentally made a person? Or is this just a chatbot that for once hasn't been turned into a Nazi by exposure to the internet? The idea of AI being sentient certainly sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but on the other hand I am strongly disinclined to trust Google when they claim to not being doing evil.
