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Has Google created a sentient chatbot?
If this were April Fool’s day I would sniff ‘gotcha’. Another Guardian joke. But it isn’t April Fool’s day and the story is about a Google engineer Blake Lemoine. Blake has been placed on leave from Google for his actions promoting the rights of the company’s chatbot LaMDA. It’s name is short for ‘Language model for dialog application’. He had reached the conclusion that in its actions, LaMDA demonstrates evidence of sentience. In his own words ‘if I didn’t know exactly what it was … I’d think it was a seven year old, eight year old kid that happens to know physics’
His conclusion sounds like evidence drawing on the well-known Turing’s test for human behaviour, which is used to differentiate it from machine outputs or artificial intelligence. The Turing test examines the interactions between an observer and a response generated either by a human or a computer programme. If the observing human is unable to detect evidence of non-human responses, the programme is considered to pass the test.
But Turing’s approach has been challenged as a means of exploring human intelligence. A significant objection has been raised by the work of the American philosopher John Searle. Searle has written comprehensively on artificial intelligence, including his own thought experiment, the Chinese box test. The approach has similarities with that of Turing’s, involving an observer, and an intelligence simulator assessing outputs for evidence of sentience, the philosophical go-to of AI discourse.
Aging IT buffs may also remember the stir caused by one of first interactive computer programs known as ELIZA. ELIZA is not a mnemonic but was mischievously named after Eliza Doolittle by its inventor Joseph Wiezenbaum, one of the pioneering figures of Artificial Intelligence in the 1960s.
Weizenbaum set out to illustrate how a computer program could mimic human behaviour without consciousness. In its most famous demonstration, Eliza was programmed to reflect back the statements of the human user in the style of a psychoanalyst.
The unexpected consequences were the reactions of one user which were not unlike those of Blake Lemoine. Weizenbaum’s own secretary became convinced the messages were therapeutic and coming from a skilled psychoanalyst.
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