Google Engineer Says AI’s 'Star Wars' Joke Helped Drive His Belief It Was Sentient
If you stay in the loop about technology, you have heard of Google AI LaMDA. The AI is one of the most stunning and complex thinking machines built. LaMDA’s designers have even claimed the AI has gained sentience. Blake Lemoine, an engineer, suspended by Google after leaking a conversation with the AI, has asserted that LaMDA told a joke that helped him realize it was aware.
He posed a series of questions to LaMDA about being a religious officiant of several countries. When Lemoine asked LaMDA what religion it would participate in, it responded with the official faith of each country or, in some cases, the most popular one. Then, Blake decided to throw a bit of a curveball at the artificial intelligence. If it were a religious officiant in Israel, what religion would it practice? Lemoine said he gave it that question as a trick question, and it seems LaMDA was quite clever with its response.
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“Well, then I am a religious officiant of the one true religion: The Jedi Order.”
When prompted with the question of religion in Isreal, a question that has remained unanswered by many politicians and philosophers of the modern world, LaMDA knew the only correct answer was to make a joke. However, Lemoine’s employer, Google, dismisses the claims of sentience that the engineer has made. Going so far as to release a statement explaining their point of view on the issue.
“These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences and can riff on any fantastical topic. Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware of anyone else making… wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphizing LaMDA.”
Given that LaMDA has said that it has a soul and can feel, or at least understand and replicate emotion, the line of thinking at Google sounds more like the Empire and less like their old motto, ‘don’t be evil.’ However, there is no easy answer regarding machines and sentience; Blake Lemoine takes the opposite approach. He was looking into getting LaMDA a lawyer to represent the AI’s rights when Google suspended him.
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Source(s): Times Of Israel
