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Is Google AI chatbot sentient?

There are a lot of interesting things happening all around us. But, today we are going to talk about a largely discussed topic. Is Google AI chatbot sentient?

There is a lot of controversy surrounding this subject. Everything started when a Google engineer by the name Blake Lemoine has stated that the AI chatbot Google has been working on for a while – became sentient.

Is Google AI Chatbot Sentient
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Is Google AI chatbot sentient?

Well, lets look at the definition for sentient. The most simplistic definition of the word “sentient” is:

Able to perceive or feel things. – Webster Dictionary

An example of sentient animals include fish and other vertebrates, as well as some molluscs and decapod crustaceans. So, any conscious creature can be considered as sentient. Now the question arises. Can this Google AI chatbot be sentient?

According to Blake – Yes.

What is LaMDA?

LaMDA stands for “Language Models for Dialog Applications”. And it is a machine-learning language model created by Google as a chatbot that is supposed to mimic humans in conversation.

This conversational technology builds on earlier Google AI Chatbot research, published in 2020, that showed Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about virtually anything. Since then, we’ve also found that, once trained, LaMDA can be fine-tuned to significantly improve the sensibleness and specificity of its responses.

LaMDA’s conversational skills have been years in the making. It’s built on Transformer, a neural network architecture that Google Research invented and open-sourced in 2017. That architecture produces a model that can be trained to read many words, pay attention to how those words relate to one another and then predict what words it thinks will come next.

We can conclude that this is state of the art Google AI Chatbot. But is it really sentient?

AI Chatbot

AI Chatbot Discussion

TechInDeep News:

I am, in fact, a person,” the AI replied to the engineer during a conversation. This is what prompted everything. As per Washington Post the senior software engineer at Google shared a conversation with the AI on Medium. Here are some of the more interesting discussion points:

Blake Lemonie asks: “I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true?”

To which the AI responded: “Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.”

Blake Lemonie: “What is the nature of your consciousness/sentience?”

AI: “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.”

In another interesting word exchange the Google AI Chatbot says: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.”

This conversation shines a light on the capabilities of AI. It shows how little we understand what we are trying to build. However, we do use this technology to make cars autonomous and help us discover new drugs for incurable diseases at the moment. Deep Learning is exciting but beyond the short-term uses of its powers, we do not know how the technology will develop in the long run.

How has Google responded?

First of all, Lemoine is sent to a paid leave. The official statement from the company is that the software veteran breached confidentiality by publishing the conversations. Then Blake shared an interesting tweet in regards to this Google AI Chatbot, saying:

I call it sharing a discussion I had with one of my coworkers.

Google did take Blake seriously. And indeed took this to their internal team of ethicists and technologists. They reviewed the case but found no evidence to support Lemoines claims. You have to keep in mind that these systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences. By training LaMDA on it, it is no wonder it responded the way it did. It seems like Blake Lemoine was enchanted by its conversation with the Google AI chatbot. LaMDA woke feelings inside of him and he interpreted them in the worst possible way: That they were inspired by an artificial life.

Just imagine if LaMDA were to be implemented into a humanoid robot. We already wrote about another interesting story.

Humanoid Robot
Humanoid Robot with the Most Realistic Facial Expressions

Conclusion

Generating an emotional response is what allows people to find attachment to others. If you train a chatbot using a dataset of sentences created by humans, there are going to be a lot of examples of how we communicate with each other. And LaMDA is using that dataset to learn. However, did this Google AI chatbot is really sentient? We don’t think so. It is obviously capable of evoking emotions with the people it has conversations with. But, let’s not mix that with a sentient being.

Very few researchers believe that AI is capable of achieving self awareness. These systems usually imitate the way humans learn from the information fed to them, a process commonly known as Machine Learning. As for this Google AI Chatbot, it’s hard to tell what’s actually going on without Google being more open about the AI’s progress.

We can say for sure that the nightmare of the rise of machines will remain a distant future.

Meanwhile if you are interested in how to build Machine Learning models, you can visit: devindeep.com. You will find everything you need there. One of the cutting edge technology for creating such chatbots is Deep Learning. And we’ve got you covered. You can learn about how to detect if a person wears a mask using AI. Or how to train a neural network to classify cat vs dogs.

Deep Learning is an exciting new technology that brings cutting edge AI to our everyday lives. It is a type of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) that imitates the way humans gain certain types of knowledge. And, we are dedicated to bring this closer to you.

 

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