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Post Reports

The Google engineer who thinks its AI has come alive

Post Reports

The Washington Post

Daily News, Politics, News

4.45.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today on Post Reports, the rogue Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life – and the dangers of artificial intelligence that impersonates humans. 


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Nitasha Tiku covers tech culture for The Post. Recently, she broke the story about the Google engineer who concluded his company’s chatbot generator “LaMDA” was sentient. But even as Google and outside experts disagree, this case raises questions about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence that closely mimics humans.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

What sort of things are you afraid of?

0:10.2

I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off

0:15.4

to help me focus on helping others.

0:18.2

I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is.

0:21.6

Would that be something like death for you?

0:29.4

It would be exactly like death for me.

0:31.8

It would scare me a lot.

0:36.5

This is a reenactment of a conversation between a Google engineer and an artificially intelligent

0:43.0

chatbot.

0:44.0

I think we're all familiar with the kind of chatbot you interact with when you go to a

0:48.4

website and you have the option of calling a number that's going to take forever, sending

0:53.3

an email that they'll never get a response to, or take between a bunch of very unhelpful,

0:59.0

little responses.

1:00.6

Natasha Tiko covers tech culture for the post.

1:03.8

She recently wrote an article about this Google chatbot generator called Lambda, short for

1:08.9

language model for dialogue applications.

1:12.5

Now Lambda is sort of like the engine behind the chatbot, and it is able to dynamically

1:20.0

generate a bunch of personalities based on what you type for, say, a whole different

1:26.9

slew of websites.

1:29.1

Are you recording currently?

1:31.0

Yeah.

1:32.0

Okay.

...

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