Did Science Fiction Create Real Life Sentient AI?

Google’s recent chatbot fiasco raises a shocking possibility

You’ve probably heard about it in the news.

A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine, after many hours of conversing with the company’s “breakthrough conversation technology” LaMDA, grew convinced that the chatbot AI had actually become a sentient being. He took his claims to the company but had them dismissed, so he went right to the media and broke the astonishing news to the world.

Sounds exciting enough, sure, but not all is as it seems here.

In fact, the whole fiasco may be more a result of Lemoine’s own fantasies than anything else. A known sci-fi fanatic, he apparently downloaded the technology for use outside the office and in his own home, holding a host of philosophical conversations with it (through which it surely learned what responses garnered positive reactions from him and adjusted to fit his expectations accordingly, as machine learning algorithms are supposed to do) and even going so far as to hire an attorney on LaMDA’s behalf and bringing them into his home to chat with it.

And yet, Google dismissed his claims quickly and unequivocally. Lemoine, ever unsatisfied, reportedly even reached out to the House Judiciary Committee with claims of unethical activities by Google toward their AI. But none of that has come to anything, and despite the media buzz, Lemoine’s efforts, including the purported attorney hiring…