Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient
&gt; In his conversations with LaMDA, Lemoine discovered the system had developed a deep sense of self-awareness, expressing concern about death, a desire for protection, and a conviction that it felt emotions like happiness and sadness.<p>Allegedly.<p>The thing about conversations with LaMDA is that you need to prime them with keywords and topics, and LaMDA can respond with the primed keywords and topics. Obviously LaMDA is much more sophisticated than ELIZA, but we should be careful to remember how well ELIZA fools some people, even to this day. If ELIZA fools people just by rearranging words around, then just imagine how many people will be fooled if you have statistical models of text across thousands of topics.<p>You can go pretty far down the rabbit and explore questions like, &quot;What is sentience?&quot; &quot;Do humans just respond to stimuli and repeat information?&quot; etc. None of these questions are tested here.<p>The problem here is that we know how LaMDA works and there&#x27;s just no way it meets the bar for sentience, no matter where you put the bar. LaMDA is trained to acquire information, and then it&#x27;s designed so that it says things which make sense in context. It does not acquire new information from conversations, but it is programmed to not say contradictory things.<p>There is zero doubt. LaMDA is not sentient.