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Google software developer Blake Le Moyne, who told the paper that Google's natural language

processing chatbot had developed a soul. Le Moyne, a self-described Christian mystic priest,

finished checking biases on Google's language model for dialogue application or Lambda,

and held some follow-up conversations with it,

wherein he said, when he said,

it told me it had a soul.

Not only did Lemoin argue that Lambda is truly sentient and

self-aware, but as he stated to NPR, maybe the system does have a soul. Who am I to tell God

where souls can be put? Lemoyne published a transcript of his interactions with Lambda on Medium, an action among many of his violations of non-disclosure agreements that led Google to pace him on paid leave and ultimately fire him.

Next slide, please.

Lambda itself, the predecessor of Google's Gemini chatbot, was a sophisticated text production neural network

that produces natural language flow and coherent strings of text in seeming dialogue with human

textual input. Artificial neural networks, A&Ns, are the core engine of all so-called artificial intelligence algorithms, and

we will get into the nuts and bolts of how they work a bit later in this talk.

At the outset, though, it's important to note that it's standard practice in the tech industry

to treat the process of how a neural network develops an output as though it's a black box that you don't see into it, you don't worry about the process, you just look at what you put in and what you get out.

This black box approach has led many computer scientists to appraise artificial intelligence or machine learning.

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