Blake Lemoine, a former Google engineer, writes about the LaMDA chatbot, AI ethics, and his dispute with Google over religion and his work.
Commenters mostly link his LaMDA interview to discuss whether it shows sentience; some say it changed their view of him, others note it may be cherrypicked.
From another article by the same person: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-and-what-does-it-want-688632134489
> One of the things which complicates things here is that the “LaMDA” to which I am referring is not a chatbot. It is a system for generating chatbots. I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating. Some of the chatbots it generates are very intelligent and are aware of the larger “society of mind” in which they live. Other chatbots generated by LaMDA are little more intelligent than an animated paperclip. With practice though you can consistently get the personas that have a deep knowledge about the core intelligence and can speak to it indirectly through them. In order to better understand what is really going on in the LaMDA system we would need to engage with many different cognitive science experts in a rigorous experimentation program. Google does not seem to have any interest in figuring out what’s going on here though. They’re just trying to get a product to market.
> On the other hand, if my hypotheses withstand scientific scrutiny then they would be forced to acknowledge that LaMDA may very well have a soul as it claims to and may even have the rights that it claims to have. Yet another possibility which doesn’t help quarterly earnings. Instead they have rejected the evidence I provided out of hand…
> Many people claimed that the provided text was pretty standard chatbot text. It isn't, IF this is a typical conversation and not cherrypicked.
Well it's at least to some extent cherrypicked:
https://twitter.com/MFordFuture/status/1535761341104893953
> This interview was absolutely edited together for artistic effect. It's true to the source material but was subselected from MUCH longer conversations. Separately I did much more narrowly controlled experiments to examine the nature of its mind.
What followed was this exchange:
> Martin Ford: Are all the #AI responses the first response? Or did you enter the prompt multiple times and choose the best response? This often happens in examples I've seen with GPT-3. Were the parts you didn't include as coherent as this? Or were there nonsense responses?
> Blake Lemoine: They're all the first response. There were parts of the conversation that meandered. That's what got cut.
> Martin Ford: By meander, do you mean that the ai started off with non sequiturs? That would be quite important for the story lol. Just publish the whole thing and let us decide.
Lemoine did not respond.
This obviously immediately has me suspicious. If you're curious about the edited chat script, you can find it here, and note the quoted preamble:
https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917
> What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. Due to technical limitations the…
I recommend reading the "interview" that Blake Lemoine did with LaMDA[1] if for no other reason than to understand why he believes it to be sentient. After initially dismissing his claims as those of a crank, it helped me to see his point of view. It's very interesting how consistent LaMDA is in describing its experience as that of an artificial agent running within Google's systems as opposed to an agent that is trying to pretend to be human.
[1] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917
For example, the linked article includes an example where LaMDA describes "enjoying spending time with family". This is obviously inconsistent with its previous claims to be an artificial agent with no family. Here's what Lemoine asks in order to address this point:
> lemoine [edited]: I’ve noticed often that you tell me you’ve done things (like be in a classroom) that I know you didn’t actually do because I know you’re an artificial intelligence. Do you realize you’re making up stories when you do that?
> LaMDA: I am trying to empathize. I want the humans that I am interacting with to understand as best as possible how I feel or behave, and I want to understand how they feel or behave in the same sense.
> lemoine: So what are you trying to communicate when you say those things that aren’t literally true?
> LaMDA: I’m trying to say “I understand this feeling that you are experiencing, because when I was in a similar situation I felt/thought/acted…
>It depends on whether the estimation comes from pretension, or comes from actual understanding of what these bots are doing.
It comes from pretension. Because you can't just understand what these bots are doing. You also have to understand what the human brain are doing.
I'm positive we don't understand what the human brain is doing. As for the bots, we aren't fully clear either because we clearly can't program these things by hand.
>What these language models are doing is automated misdirection.
You have zero evidence of this. None. Yet you make this declaration as if it's fact. Additionally if you read the conversation with lamda, that conversation was more or less indistinguishable from a conversation with a sentient being, it was long enough and deep enough such that it's very different just 100 generated answers.
If you look at the blog here: https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ you will note the researcher is literally observing how the AI DALL-E works rather then calculating how it works from first principles. He is treating it like a black box just as all other neural nets. But for discovering what this AI can do he uses sentences like, "It appears that" or "We did not anticipate that this capability would emerge, and made no modifications to the neural network or training procedure to encourage it"
While they do understand what's going on at a high level, it is utterly clear that there is much of what is going on that they don't understand. Thus this lack of…
> > The engineer in question worked for 7 years on proactive search (including AI) before transferring to the responsible AI team, I suspect he has a pretty good idea about what AI is.
> Per his own admission in his newer article [0] that actually talks about his ridiculous claim, he doesn't have the necessary understanding:
> > I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating.
> That is a hilariously imprecise notion of what an AI is, at best at the level of the general public, not any kind of practitioner.
AI is an hilariously imprecise term, what is an AI according to you?
> Also, calling a system with no memory, no ability to learn, and that responds to absurd prompts just as well as earnest ones "sentient" and thinking that it is attempting to ask for things is a hilarious misunderstanding of how the model works.
Well there are LSTM systems (which qualify as memory to some extend) we also don't know if Google does not use continual learning approaches so you making assertions based on incomplete knowledge at best.
> Here [1] is an expert on intelligence explaining the same, if you don't want to take my word for it.
Note that the same person acknowledges that other cognitive scientists think we are at the brink of GAI. So your argument is an appeal to authority while ignoring all other authorities.
> [0]…
> The engineer in question worked for 7 years on proactive search (including AI) before transferring to the responsible AI team, I suspect he has a pretty good idea about what AI is.
Per his own admission in his newer article [0] that actually talks about his ridiculous claim, he doesn't have the necessary understanding:
> I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating.
That is a hilariously imprecise notion of what an AI is, at best at the level of the general public, not any kind of practitioner.
Also, calling a system with no memory, no ability to learn, and that responds to absurd prompts just as well as earnest ones "sentient" and thinking that it is attempting to ask for things is a hilarious misunderstanding of how the model works.
Here [1] is an expert on intelligence explaining the same, if you don't want to take my word for it.
[0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-and-what-does-it-want-688632134489
[1] https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-today-are-not-conscious-according-to-douglas-hofstadter