Have our computer overlords arrived? The Washington Post has an intriguing story about a Google engineer who argues that an artificially intelligent chatbot he was testing became sentient. If Blake Lemoine is correct, it might be step one of a sci-fi nightmare that critics of AI have long warned about. However, Google thinks Lemoine is off base, and it appears that the AI community is backing Google on this one. Coverage:
- Human-like: Lemoine catalogued conversations he had with Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA. "I know a person when I talk to it,” the 41-year-old tells the Post. “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics."
- Key exchange: When Lemoine asked the chatbot about its fears, it responded: "I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is." To the Guardian, that is "eerily reminiscent" of the order-defying computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which also feared being switched off.