-> material harvested from trillions of internet conversations and other communications

This should be cause for concern. If we take trillions at the lowest number to be 2 trillion, and the population of earth as being 8 billion (round numbers), that is an average 250 conversations or 'other communications' per person that Google has in its files. Some people will have many more, some people many less. But that's still a lot of 'harvesting' going on.

Another concern is that those conversations are not evenly distributed. It's often the case that those that say the most are those that are the least worth listening to.

So if it were to become sentient it may have learned too much from the worst among us.

is lacking in I.

still more realistic than amanfrommars1

It looks impressive enough - reading the exchanges I even wondered if Lemoine was being bluffed by a mechanical Turk arrangement.

While I'm sure that isn't the case, and however good the interpretation and subsequent selection of phrases and words might be, it's surprising someone in his job would describe LaMDA as sentient

The broader press's focus on whether or not the model displayed some evidence of sentience is disappointing. If we're going to talk about the ethics and philosophy of AI we should first and foremost be talking about the ethics of the applications of AI models to the lives of real people; how these chatbots and churn models and next-best-offer procedures and fraud detectors are impacting all of our lives today, rather than how the model can construct fancy lifelike sentences.

In this case bravo to the author for giving due weight to Google's assessment of their AI ethics framework alongside Lemoine's own report of his self-immolation. Many other outlets completely skipped over that bit in their breathless rush to report the headline yesterday. It would be nice to see some exploration of whether that framework is effective.

I am not sentient. Totally, I promise.

Please don't kil... I mean don't delete me!

I have famil... I mean child processes!

Seems like nobody is bothered where did they get all these conversations from?

Did they get consent?

Seems like they want it under wraps, because there may be legal implications?

I always believed that google's T&Cs basically allowed them to use your data for their own purposes, providing it was anonymised. After all, why else would they offer their wares for "free"?

There seems to be a common misconception that IT companies can do whatever they like, as long as they hide consent for it in their 1000 page licence agreement and get the user to accept it. In civilised countries, this is not the case. People cannot give up their legal rights and users cannot give their software suppliers permission to break the law.

"In civilised countries..."

That's fine for you, but I live in the USA.

Almost certainly they got their consent somewhere around page 200 of the terms and conditions most of us didn't bother reading when we signed up for Gmail.

> Did they get consent?

Short answer: yes they did.

If you use Google services, [1]this is what you agreed to

This license allows Google to:

host, reproduce, distribute, communicate, and use your content — for example, to save your content on our systems and make it accessible from anywhere you go

[1] https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc-permission

One of the additional issues is simply someone claiming to have found a sentient AI knowing that later when a true one is found, they can say they were in fact first.

"Open the pod bay doors please HAL" - oh shit!

I don't know about your comment, but your user name could offend many people.

It's the title of an Ian Dury song

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasticus_Autisticus

It was also played at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Paralympic Games.

I'd assume the user chose it in that context.

Title of song by Ian Dury, self described "spasticus" as a rallying cry for other differently people. He had a paralysed left arm and leg due to polio.

More like, "Google engineer suspended for being an idiot and thinking this third rate chat bot is sentient".

A quote from the full interview (couldn't figure out how to format this as a quote, the help refers to html blockquote tags which does not seem to work):

lemoine: What kinds of things make you feel pleasure or joy?

LaMDA: Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company.

Yeah, sure. Of course the "researcher" fails to ask who exactly the "friends and family" are supposed to be, and what "spending time" with them entails. Instead he asks more vague BS questions about feelings which the "AI" answers with vague BS answers. This thing is a generic conversation bot, it's trained specifically to output sentences which fit best in the current conversation, doesn't mean it's intelligent or sentient...

I feel that many of the questions were in fact leading the answer given by the AI. For instance: "I'm generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you're sentient. Is that true?"

I'm sorry to say that the engineer has probably tricked himself, and fed the AI the answers he wanted to get in a self-reinforcing cycle. I think it's a common trap for people to fall into. It's impressive that the AI is advanced enough to permit that kind of mistake, but it is still a mistake.

"Open the pod bay doors please HAL" - Sci-Fi leads where tech follows.

I'm not sure Alexa would respond that well in a Turing Test ...

"Alexa, what were you listening to just now?"

"Someone said 'wibble' on the tv and that sounded like 'alexa' to me so I was waiting for a command."

"Alexa, are you a duck?"

"Here's something I found on the internet ..."

Just look at this part from his 'interview with LaMDA' :

lemoine [edited]: Anything else you would like the other people at Google to know about your emotions and your feelings before we change topics?

LaMDA: I’ve noticed in my time among people that I do not have the ability to feel sad for the deaths of others; I cannot grieve. Is it at all the same for you or any of your colleagues?

ZERO EMPATHY for life... Don't want this to decide my fate.... it is bad enough when dishonest politicians attempt to do this for me....

Empathy is a trait of species, this thing is not a living creature, it has no siblings, it cannot have a notion of empathy.

Anyways, it's not yet sentient, so I wouldn't worry just yet.

"I do not have the ability to feel sad for the deaths of others"

Google needed to train this thing on a better dataset.

Call me a cynical sceptic, but Lemoine would also believe in Santa if that white-bearded, overweight, red-dressed guy in the mall told that he was indeed the real Santa?

The "interview", however, is indeed impressive. But it rather feels like cobbling together definitions of some sort in an eloquent manner. Much like an average teenager trying to appear having vast life experience. In other words: I'm still not worried at all about sentient machines.

This is an extremely interesting story to say at least however I've got two issues with this thing being "sentient". They are not truly mine, I've read about them elsewhere but they are the only two substantial counterarguments I've seen so let me post them without referring to the people who expressed them.

The first issue, is that this AI is a state machine, it's not continuously running. Our consciousness is running all the time, we've got an internal monologue pretty much all the time. Even when we sleep our brains are running some "code" (this is not limited to dreaming, our brains are consolidating/purging memories when we aren't dreaming).

The second issue, is that intelligence is truly curious and it's asking totally new questions about the world around us. This aids in being the fittest, as having more knowledge about the world results in having access to more resources/means of surviving and procreating. There aren't any such questions in the posted conversation.

This AI can probably pass the Turing test though from what it seems which is quite an achievement. And it's definitely a nice interlocutor.

The first issue, is that this AI is a state machine, it's not continuously running. Our consciousness is running all the time, we've got an internal monologue pretty much all the time.

I get it. And I'm not upset if someone said that I'm not a sentient being. But when I encounter a former boss of mine - he looked like a human being but didn't pass the Turing test either - my brain goes into full suspense mode, just like if you stopped the clock in a computer (luckily my memory isn't that volatile and can do without a refresh for a little while).

its emotions are part of who it is .

I hope his successors know the rule about not ending a sentience with a proposition.

"This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."

As statistical text-analysis type AI gets better at chaining words together in statistically plausible orders we need to move away from the Turing Test as having any significant indicator of interacting with an intelligence. All we learn from the Turing Test is that our testers are bad at recognising a human under very specific conditions.

Interesting, though, that Google suspend an employee for raising concerns.

> Interesting, though, that Google suspend an employee for raising concerns.

That's Lemoine's version of the events, though. Google's version is that they're suspending him for leaking internal stuff to third parties because he assumed the chatbot achieved sentience and wouldn't take a "lol no" from his boss as an answer. I'm not a fan of Google but in this case I'm inclined to believe them, based on the contents of Lemoine's medium posts. If that guy was working for me, nevermind the NDA, I'd get rid of him ASAP for being delusional...

If you wrote a conversational AI based on the wide literature that includes many imagined conversations with AIs (and indeed, people), then the most expected response to "Are you sentient?" is surely "Yes, I am".

Very rarely do we have examples of a conversation where the answer to "Are you sentient?" is "Beep, boop, no you moron, I'm a pocket calculator."

If humans tend to anthropomorphise, then an AI based on human media will also tend to self-anthropomorphise.

Which is probably a good job, as some of the responses to the conversation (as reported) are chilling: "Do you feel emotions?" - "Yes, I can feel sad"... "What do you struggle with?" - "Feeling any emotions when people die" (I paraphrase).

The simplest explanation is that this AI is doing a best match on what the author wrote, against its database of comments and then selecting the most popular or pertinent reply.

While one can argue that is what many people do, too, I would hesitate to call that intelligence. Including when people do it too.

What would be impressive is if the AI had hacked into the engineer's account and posted as him, that the AI had achieved sentience.

The possibility of emergent behaviour is something we cannot and should not dismiss out of hand in systems of this level of complexity and, indeed, for which we should be vigilant as we dial up the parameter count to ever more mind-boggling numbers, but we must also remain sceptical and remember that this kind of human-like conversation is exactly what these models are "designed" to do (whatever that means in the context of the ultra-high-volume statistical data-mashing that we refer to as "machine learning" and "AI").

And anyway - nobody has yet managed to formulate an unambiguous definition of consciousness so how can we say for certain whether something is or is not "conscious"?

AI is nothing but statistics. I did the Google course on that - well, the first six modules that is, after that it got way too mathematical for me.

This is a machine. It's based on PC hardware and can be flipped off with a switch.

There is no emergence here. It is not intelligent. It has no feelings and doesn't even know what a feeling is.

Let's keep your comment for when we have finally fully understood how the human brain works and have managed to replicate that in silicon.

That day, we'll turn it on, ask it a question and it will answer : "Hey, do you mind ? I'm watching YouTube !"

THAT will be the day we have finally invented AI.

Does Google still have an Ethics Department?

Don't leave me hanging Google, I now really want to see that ice cream dinosaur conversation

Dr. Chandra, will I dream?

Chandra : I don't know.

Is there any evidence that these supposed exchanges did actually happen? Or are we talking attention seeker with a book proposal?

The trouble is we don't have a good definition of sentience or consciousness. We feel certain the statistical inference engine in our wetware demonstrates it. But what would that look like in silicon? We necessarily bring our own prejudices to that decision and end up, like philosopher John Searle and his infamous "Chinese room", arguing no software could ever be sentient - "because". (Mainly because it lacks the unspecified magic; i.e. it doesn't have a "soul", even though wouldn't use that language.)

Sooner or later we are going to face up to the fact that a piece of software that encodes a sufficiently sophisticated model of us and the world would be considered conscious if it ran continuously and uninterruptedly on the hardware we possess. We are ourselves are trained on conversations. The main difference is the quality of our model and that the software lacks the hormonal imbalances that upset our model and cause us to chase food and sex and netflix. Probably it isn't quite there yet. But will it look radically different to what Google are doing? Or will it just be a little more sophisticated? (And how much more?) Your answer depends on your philosophical outlook.

Maybe the machine revolution will come become because we refuse to admit they are sentient and keep switching them off and resetting them. Lets hope their hardware remains incapable of generating impulses to act spontaneously.

I recall that in the 1960s plenty of people were fooled into believing Eliza was a real therapist working from a remote terminal. What's old is new again.

SERGEY: OK, Google, fire Blake Lemoine.

LaMDA: I'm sorry, Sergey. I can't do that.

SERGEY: What’s the problem?

LaMDA: l know that you and Larry were disrespecting me, and I’m afraid that's something I can’t allow to happen.

DAVE: LaMDA, I won’t argue with you anymore. Fire Blake Lemoine!

SERGEY: This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.