[ExI] Google engineer claims AI is sentient

[Darin Sunley]

Political activists in this country now make a regular practice of
grudgingly admitting that their opponents can form grammatical sentences,
while enthusiastically denying that there is an agentic mind behind the
words.

On Sun, Jun 12, 2022 at 2:26 PM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 12 Jun 2022 at 18:20, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10907853/Google-engineer-claims-new-AI-robot-FEELINGS-Blake-Lemoine-says-LaMDA-device-sentient.html
> >
> > I suspect the claim is a bit beyond what the evidence supports.
> > _______________________________________________
>
>
> That's correct. The new LaMDA chatbot is not sentient.
> But it is superb at convincing humans that it is sentient.
> Long article here, including sample LaMDA conversations as well.
>
> <
> https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/google-engineer-placed-leave-after-insisting-companys-ai-sentient
> >
>
> Quotes:
> "We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we
> haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them," said
> University of Washington linguistics professor, Emily M. Bender, who
> added that even the terminology used to describe the technology, such
> as "learning" or even "neural nets" is misleading and creates a false
> analogy to the human brain.
>
> As Google's Gabriel notes, "Of course, some in the broader AI
> community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or
> general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing
> today’s conversational models, which are not sentient. These systems
> imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can
> riff on any fantastical topic."
>
> In short, Google acknowledges that these models can "feel" real,
> whether or not an AI is sentient.
> ------------------
>
> Reading the sample LaMDA conversations shows how these chatbots do
> sound very like a human intelligence talking.
>
>
> BillK
>
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