June 20, 2022
Prominent AI researchers have criticized Google engineer Blake Lemoine’s claims that the company’s LaMDA AI is sentient.
Lemoine published an alleged interview with LaMDA AI to capture the machine’s sentience. In his interview with the Post, he explained that working with large systems like LaMDA convinced him that advanced machine learning systems have become intelligent beings capable of reasoning.
For Meridith Whittaker, a former Google AI researcher who teaches at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, discussing AI sentient abilities is an important distraction that takes the pressure off big technology companies building automated systems.
“I’m clinically annoyed by this discourse. We’re forced to spend our time refuting childsplay nonsense while the companies benefiting from the AI narrative expand metastatically, taking control of decision making and core infrastructure across our social/political institutions. Of course, data-centric computational models aren’t sentient, but why are we even talking about this?” asked Whittaker.
The sources for this piece include an article in MOTHERBOARD.
