“There’s a chance that — and I believe it is the case — that they have feelings and they can suffer and they can experience joy, and humans should at least keep that in mind when interacting with them.”
Last summer, former Google engineer and AI ethicist Blake Lemoine went viral after going on record with The Washington Post to claim that LaMDA, Google’s powerful large language model (LLM), had come to life. Lemoine had raised alarm bells internally, but Google didn’t agree with the engineer’s claims. The ethicist then went to the press — and was fired by Google shortly thereafter.
“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to knowphysics,” Lemoine told WaPo at the time. “I know a person when I talk to it.”
The report made waves, sparking debate in academic circles as well as the nascent AI business. And then, for a while, things died down.