LaMDA is not sentient
I think the real ethical concern here should be that people can be idly fooled into thinking good chat bots are sentient.<p>Like this guy isn&#x27;t the only person in the world who would fall for LaMDA&#x27;s parlor tricks.  He&#x27;s just the one who got to spend hours talking to it every day.  If you set up every American with a copy, I bet a non-trivial portion of society would come to the same conclusion.  People are naturally predisposed to ascribe intelligence and emotion to things they interact with.<p>In a few years, if access to even better chat bots becomes common place, what will happen if there&#x27;s no longer one Blake Lemoine, but hundreds of thousands or millions?  What happens if a significant chunk of society thinks that every large language model is a sentience, and the rest of society thinks it&#x27;s just a big math formula?<p>How long before we have a religion where you ask the chat bot for daily guidance?