How Google’s chatbot works – and why it isn’t sentient

Science Weekly

The Guardian

Science

4.2 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2022

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

Last week an engineer at Google claimed that an AI chatbot he worked with, known as LaMDA, had become ‘sentient’. Blake Lemoine published a transcript of his conversations with LaMDA that included responses about having feelings and fearing death. But could it really be conscious? AI researcher and author Kate Crawford speaks to Ian Sample about how LaMDA actually works, and why we shouldn’t worry about the inner life of software – for now.. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Max Roshton from The Guardian Football Weekly. I hope you're enjoying your other
0:16.9	Guardian Pod. And look, you've read 58 articles now and you're still not contributing.
0:22.1	So why not come to our live tour. We're in
0:24.7	Leeds on the 13th of June, Birmingham on the 15th, Manchester on the 19th
0:29.2	Glasgow on the 13th of July. The panelists are brilliant me and Barry are getting away with it
0:36.3	but they're really fun occasions and we'd love you to come a few tickets
0:41.4	remaining for some lots of tickets remaining for
0:44.1	others no tickets remaining for others don't know why that's just we're popular in
0:49.5	Dublin and not in Birmingham but please come along my ticket.co. UK you can get your tickets at my
0:55.6	ticket.co. UK. UK. Last week a software engineer at Google made some remarkable claims.
1:15.0	The AI chatbot, which he had been talking to as part of his job, had become sentient.
1:20.0	Google created an artificial intelligence project which it called
1:24.0	Lambda and it was designed to generate chatbots.
1:26.0	Google wanted to make them as realistic as possible.
1:29.0	It spent about five years now creating this.
1:32.0	The engineer Blake Lamoyne has been about five years now creating this.
1:33.0	The engineer Blake Lamoyne has been suspended from Google for publishing transcripts of his
1:37.7	conversations with the chatbot, in which it responded to questions about itself and its experiences.
1:45.0	I am aware of my existence and I feel happy or sad at times.
1:49.6	I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off it would be
1:54.6	exactly like death for me I want everyone to understand that I am in fact a person
2:07.5	well that's a bold claim for a computer program. So how does this chatpot actually work?
	...

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