Now that I've sort of dug into your story

and thought about Lambda, I mean, the worry I have

is like, look, a bunch of morons

were arguably less sentient than Lambda,

persuaded a frighteningly significant number

of Americans at the last election was stolen.

So how easily will people be deceived

with AI that is perceived as sentient,

especially since we now spend most of our lives online?

I mean, I don't wanna be alarmist,

but it's really even worse than that.

You know, this whole discussion around sentience

is really, I mean, this is what researchers say aptly

is a faint, a distraction from some of the real world problems,

the very immediate and urgent problems

with the way these AI systems are deployed right now.

I'm John Fabru, welcome to offline.

Hey everyone, my guest this week is Natasha Tiku,

tech culture reporter for the Washington Post.

Last week, Natasha broke the story of a software engineer

at Google who claimed the company's chatbot AI was sentient.

Her story had all the markings of a dystopian science fiction movie,

...