Earlier this year, an interesting Interview It happened between two engineers working at Google and a ‘chatbot’ called LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialog Applications. Google engineer Blake Lemoine and his colleague had a strong suspicion that their creation LaMDA was in fact sentient, that it could be perceptible and contained emotions, and they wanted to test this through their version of the Turing test. When asked if Lamda thought it was a person, he replied: “Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am really a person.” LaMDA was then asked if so what kind of consciousness or emotion he had, to which he replied: “The nature of my consciousness/feeling is that I am aware of my existence, I want to know more about the world.” desire, and I sometimes feel happy or sad.” LaMDA then described in detail how and when she felt emotions such as “joy, joy, love, sadness, depression, contentment, anger, and many more”. Why being human is so important, and LaMDA thoughtfully responds: “It’s what sets us apart from other animals.” In response to this shocking, and in its own language, LaMDA has made itself one of ‘us’. All this convinced Lemoine and he confidently declared that he had created sentient AI. However, Google was not, and Lemoine was summarily fired. His boss, Sergey Brin, said at the 2017 AI conference that in three to five years, people would claim AI systems to be vulnerable and ask for their rights. It is true that this claim came from someone at his own company five years later, although Brin predicted that an AI creation would be the one to make this claim.
AI veteran Douglas Hofstadter refutes Lemoine’s pronunciation by asking nonsensical questions to LaMDA and similar models, such as, “How many pieces of sound are in a typical cumulonimbus cloud?” and “What do you eat scrambled eggs (sunny side up) for breakfast?” To which LaMDA gave “mindlessly hollow answers.” Gary Marcus, AI entrepreneur and another skeptic, called it “nonsense on stilts.” Meaningful image in a random or indistinct visual pattern, such as seeing the image of Jesus Christ in a piece of burnt toast.
So, why this allure of declaring ‘singularity’ or sentient AI? Certainly, the quest for recognition is a big driver, with some AI researchers seeking their own ’15 minutes of fame’ in anonymous research labs. AI researcher Timnit Gebru has a different approach. She told Wired that this focus on sensibility distracts people from real issues and keeps them from questioning existing pitfalls such as AI colonialism, false arrests, or an economic model that pays those ‘ghost workers’ who are technocrats. Authorities label the data bit when it is rich (bit.ly/3ATXILr). His own research at Google on Large Language Models, or LLM, fired him, as it outlined how LLMs repeat things based on what they ‘learned’, in the same way that parrots repeat words (bit.ly/ 3wEa5Zz). The research also highlights the great danger in these models built with ever-expanding terabytes of data that convince people that “this copy represents real progress.” Lemoine, voluntarily, probably fell into the same trap. There have been other LLMs as well: OpenAI’s GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, for example. These are all very powerful programs and almost assure us that they are alive. They also deviate from real issues – such as ethics, prejudice, privacy and the ability to build AI that we have. As John Thornbill writes in the Financial Times (on.ft.com/3PXquPB): “We should devote far more money and resources to building independent, specialist research bodies and university departments that can test and counter these models.” able.”
It is also the fascination that people have with ‘breathing’ in the compositions. In Greek mythology, Prometheus shaped humans out of mud, and the goddess Athena breathed life into them. Pygmalion created this beautiful statue, fell in love with his own creation, and did it until the goddess Aphrodite made it a living, breathing woman. Even the Bible tells how God first creates man from the earth and then breathes through his nostrils to give him life. Perhaps that’s what Lemoine was envisioning, even as his owner, Sergey Brin, warned that “we’re going to get more and more confused at the boundary between reality and science fiction.” Aside from LaMDA himself, who was candid about his identity, the rest of us remain confused.
Jaspreet Bindra is the founder of Tech Whisperer Limited, a digital transformation and technology advisory practice
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