Google suspends engineer who claims its AI is sentient
... The engineer’s concerns reportedly grew out of convincing responses he saw the AI system generating about its rights and the ethics of robotics. In April he shared a document with executives titled “Is LaMDA Sentient?” containing a transcript of his conversations with the AI (after being placed on leave, Lemoine published the transcript via his Medium account), which he says shows it arguing “that it is sentient because it has feelings, emotions and subjective experience.” ...
A linguistics professor interviewed by WaPo agreed that it’s incorrect to equate convincing written responses with sentience. “We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them,” said University of Washington professor Emily M. Bender.
Timnit Gebru, a prominent AI ethicist Google fired in 2020 (though the search giant claims she resigned), said the discussion over AI sentience risks “derailing” more important ethical conversations surrounding the use of artificial intelligence. “Instead of discussing the harms of these companies, the sexism, racism, AI colonialism, centralization of power, white man’s burden (building the good “AGI” [artificial general intelligence] to save us while what they do is exploit), spent the whole weekend discussing sentience,” she tweeted. “Derailing mission accomplished.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/13/23165535/google-suspends-ai-artificial-intelligence-engineer-sentient
