Friday, August 12, 2022

AI: Is Google LaMDA Sentient?

Episode #290 Sentient AI? If so, then what? - [Python Bytes Podcast]

Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient | Google | The Guardian

Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview | by Blake Lemoine | Jun, 2022 | Medium

Is Google's 'sentient' LaMDA AI interview fake? Eliza effect explained

LaMDA stands for Language Models for Dialogue Applications and is a system Google uses to develop chatbots that interact with human users. The program is trained by being “fed” dialogue sequences to help the AI create open-ended, non-repetitive dialogue that is factual and stays on topic.

Previous demos, like the one from Google’s 2021 I/O event, show LaMDA using language with uncanny elasticity and ease. At one point, it presents a number of facts about Pluto from a first-person perspective using words and structures that closely mimic human speech and emotion.


LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is a family of conversational neural language models developed by Google. The first generation was announced during the 2021 Google I/O keynote, while the second generation was announced at the following year's event. In June 2022, LaMDA gained widespread attention when Google engineer Blake Lemoine made claims that the chatbot had become sentient. The scientific community has largely rejected Lemoine's claims, though it has led to conversations about the efficacy of the Turing test, which measures whether a computer can pass for a human.