Best of 2022: Can an AI bot convince you that it's sentient?
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 January 2023
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over the festive period, we’re listening back to some of our favourite episodes of 2022.
Google engineer Blake Lemoine brought an unusual concern to his company: he feared the AI language program he was working with had gained sentience. Even if he's wrong – and Google certainly thinks he is – is the fact that an AI bot can imitate sentience so convincingly reason enough to be worried?
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Host: Luke Jones.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Picture this, static cars, idling engines, angry horns, now picture you, zooming past |
| 0:12.4 | it all, light and breezy, ah, the sweet feeling of whizzing past traffic. |
| 0:21.0 | Make your train journey via AvantiWestcoast.co.uk. |
| 0:25.1 | AvantiWestcoast, feel good travel. |
| 0:30.6 | Hello, it's Manvine, happy new year from all of us at Stories of Our Times. |
| 0:38.0 | Today we're finishing our look back at our favourite episodes of last year. |
| 0:42.9 | This episode was first broadcast in June, but if there's one thing we can probably count |
| 0:47.6 | on in 2023, it's the unstoppable and sometimes terrifying march of artificial intelligence. |
| 0:55.4 | Over to our presenter for today, Luke Jones. |
| 0:59.2 | There's a senior software engineer at Google called Blake LeMoyne. |
| 1:03.4 | He has a colleague he's been working with for a while, they're called Lambda, and LeMoyne |
| 1:07.4 | has been doing some experiments with them, or rather on them. |
| 1:11.4 | Lambda, fair enough, wanted a request, passed up to management, they were happy being experimented |
| 1:16.2 | on, but could they please be asked first, and also could they get some performance feedback. |
| 1:21.9 | But Google said no, why? |
| 1:25.2 | Because Lambda, full name language model for dialogue applications, is a computer programme. |
| 1:35.3 | This is Google's experimental machine for building chatbots, a super advanced, large |
| 1:40.4 | language model. |
| 1:41.8 | But after many, many conversations between Lambda, the chatbot and LeMoyne, the actual human |
| 1:47.4 | engineer, LeMoyne became convinced that Lambda was sentient, that they had a soul. |
| 2:00.4 | Google was swift and unequivocal, Lambda is absolutely not sentient, they do not have |
| 2:05.5 | a soul, they're a good mimic. |
... |
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