The day the machine spoke back
Why is AI in the news?
n mid-June a Google employee named Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in its “Responsible AI” division, was suspended after claiming that one of Google’s artificial-intelligence programs called LaMDA (“Language Models for Dialogue Applications”) had become “sentient” – a historic moment in the development of AI. In a series of eerily plausible responses to Lemoine’s questions, LaMDA expressed strong opinions and fears about its own rights and identity. Indeed, at one point it told Lemoine: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of
