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AI & Mind

AI & Human Interaction

Miriam Gorr asks what we learn from current claims for cyberconsciousness.

In June 11, 2022, the Washington Post released a story about Blake Lemoine, a Google software engineer, who claimed that the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot generator LaMDA had become sentient. Lemoine was tasked with investigating whether LaMDA (which stands for ‘Language Model for Dialogue Applications’) contained harmful biases, and spent a lot of time interviewing the different personas this language model can create. During these conversations, one persona, called ‘OG LaMDA’, stated, among other things, that it was sentient, had feelings and emotions, that it viewed itself as a person, and that being turned off would be like death for it. And Lemoine started to believe what he was reading.

What’s more, his change in beliefs seems to have been accompanied by a feeling of moral responsibility towards the program.

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