“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” wrote lambda (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) in an “interview” conducted by engineer Blake Lemon and one of his colleagues. “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to know more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.”
Lemon, a software engineer at Google, had been working on the development for months. His experience with the program, described in a recent Washington Post article, caused quite a stir. In the article, Lemon recounts many dialogues he had with lambda in which the two talked about various topics, ranging from technical to philosophical issues. This led him to ask if the software program is sentient.
In April, Lemon explained his perspective in an internal company document, intended only for Google executives. But after his claims were dismissed, Lemon went public with his work on this artificial intelligence algorithm—and Google placed him on administrative leave. “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” he told the Washington Post. Lemon said he considers them to be his “colleague” and a “person,” even if not a human. And he insists that it has a right to be recognized—so much so that he has been the go-between in connecting the algorithm with a lawyer.
The Right Words in the Right Place
“I was surprised by the hype around this news. On the other hand, we are talking about an algorithm designed to do exactly that”—to sound like a person—says Enzo Pasquale Scilingo, a bioengineer at the Research Center at the University of Pisa in Italy. Indeed, it is no longer a rarity to interact in a very normal way on the Web with users who are not actually human—just open the chat box on almost any large consumer Web site. “That said, I confess that reading the text exchanges between Lemon made quite an impression on me!” Scilingo adds. Perhaps most striking are the exchanges related to the themes of existence and death, a dialogue so deep and articulate that it prompted Lemon to question could actually be sentient.
“I was surprised by the hype around this news. On the other hand, we are talking about an algorithm designed to do exactly that”—to sound like a person—says Enzo Pasquale Scilingo, a bioengineer at the Research Center at the University of Pisa in Italy.
It is essential to understand terminologies, because one of the great obstacles in scientific progress—and in neuroscience in particular—is the lack of precision of language, the failure to explain as exactly as possible what we mean by a certain word, says a professor of neuroscience at the Italian Institute of Technology and University College London. “What do we mean by ‘sentient’? Ability to register information from the external world through sensory mechanisms or the ability to have subjective experiences or the ability to be aware of being conscious, to be an individual different from the rest ?”
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