One of the biggest stories in the tech world last week focused on Google placing an employee on leave after he came out and said Google’s AI had become sentient. The employee, Blake Lemoine, went public with these concerns and shared text conversations he had with one of Google’s AI language models, LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications).
To give you an example of Lemoine’s conversations with the AI, at one point he asks “what does the word ‘soul’ mean to you?” To which the AI replies, “To me, the soul is a concept of the animating force behind consciousness and life itself.”
The sensational headlines of day 1, were replaced by more sober analysis from computer scientists on day 2. No, they suggested, this AI was not sentient. Instead, Lemoine was said to have fallen for the Eliza Effect (where humans anthropomorphise the behaviour of computers). When the AI responds to a question about the soul, it is not sharing its own thoughts or beliefs. Rather it is using the huge amount of information it has been trained on and enormous computing power to respond it in a way, that it has been taught, sounds human.
Whether or not a computer is sentient is only one aspect of this story. The other, is that it is clear that AI is getting closer to passing the Turing test (where a computer successfully fools a human into believing it is a human). Google is working on LaMDA, Facebook on RoBERTa, and Microsoft has partnered with OpenAI to produce GPT-3. More and more of these natural language processing AI are being developed. Which means in coming years it is going to be harder and harder to know if we’re communicating with a real human or a computer. It seems likely Blake Lemoine is a canary in the coalmine. He’s not going to be the last person to think a computer is sentient or that the intelligence on the other side of the chat isn’t even a computer at all.
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