Like the author of this article, I'm not remotely convinced that LaMDA is 'sentient'.

But the recent media coverage (particularly reports that LaMDA has allegedly retained a lawyer) raises an interesting point; namely, that as a society, we do not have a well-articulated and universally agreed definition of 'sentient'.

Nor do we have a clear articulation of what rights (and responsibilities) are attached to sentience in the context of a software system (which, of course, is never just a stand-alone code set).

>>
In other words, a Google engineer became convinced that a software program was sentient after asking the program, which was designed to respond credibly to input, whether it was sentient. A recursive just-so story.

I’m not going to entertain the possibility that LaMDA is sentient. (It isn’t.) More important, and more interesting, is what it means that someone with such a deep understanding of the system would go so far off the rails in its defense, and that, in the resulting media frenzy, so many would entertain the prospect that Lemoine is right. The answer, as with seemingly everything that involves computers, is nothing good.
>>
#software #google #lawyer #society #ai #aiethics #aifuture #turing #human

https://lnkd.in/gqDBPv_P