While in this particular instance the concerns might be unfounded, I think this raises an interesting question: what criteria do we have to attribute sentience

While in this particular instance the concerns might be unfounded, I think this raises an interesting question: what criteria do we have to attribute sentience to an entity? These are exactly the questions an AI Ethicist should think about. You would think that the easiest way to demonstrate that LaMDA does not have sentience would be to have a conversation with it where it "loses the plot". Did Google do that? Here is a comment from lesswrong.com which is probably what happened: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vqgpDoY4eKyNnWoFd/a-claim-that-google-s-lamda-is-sentient?commentId=JyWietjDSG4MAWAQR#comments https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vqgpDoY4eKyNnWoFd/a-claim-th... "It's neither a hoax nor a HLAI, instead a predictable consequence of prompting a LLM with questions about its sentience: it will imitate the answers a human might give when prompted, or the sort of answers an AI in a science fiction story would give."