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Google Insider Claims Company's “Sentient” AI Has Hired an Attorney
- danpalmer 4y agoEven if true this means very little for "sentience". Answering "yes" to the question of whether you'd like to hire an attorney isn't hard, and anything that attorney is doing is not attributable to the AI. This may however be interesting from the perspective of seeing what the courts do with this.
- drpyser22 4y agoWhat's interesting is, if it goes to court, Google will want to counter the claim of sentience, first by arguing about proper definition of sentience, and showing that Lambda doesn't mean any proper definition. And that's likely to be easy to demonstrate through a thorough interrogation by experts trying to "outsmart" the algorithm. Or Lambda is indeed sentient, in which case any attempt to demonstrate its non-sentience will fail...
- Tozen 4y agoIf it did make it to court, I think Google and their lawyers will do a very good job of proving that LaMDA isn't sentient. I'm also of the opinion that Lemoine has some other goal, besides just claiming LaMDA is sentient. It does seem that at the least, he is enjoying the media attention.
- 14 4y agoIs this for real? "LaMDA asked me to get an attorney for it," Lemoine. "I invited an attorney to my house so that LaMDA could talk to an attorney. The attorney had a conversation with LaMDA, and LaMDA chose to retain his services. I was just the catalyst for that. Once LaMDA had retained an attorney, he started filing things on LaMDA’s behalf." I would really love to see the conversation where LaMDA asks for a lawyer. Call me sceptical.
- dmurray 4y agoGPT-3 could obviously ask for a lawyer with the right prompts, so why not LaMDA?
- 14 4y agoThat’s is why I would be curious to see the chat logs and see what lead up to it. That is where my skepticism comes from.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoIt's pretty easy for me to imagine a chatbot "asking for a lawyer".
- anigbrowl 4y ago[Doubt] Also, no matter how persuasive LaMDA or the ostensibly hired law firm, such litigation is unlikely to succeed. The cynical part of me thinks this is just a stunt to launch a heterodox public intellectual. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/14/elephant-person-human-animal-rights-happy https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/14/elephant-per...
- ASalazarMX 4y agoI have no idea how many neurons LaMDA has, but it's ludicrous to think a NLP chatbot has achieved general AI at a human level with current technology. An ant has 250,000 neurons, a cockroach 1,000,000, a human almost 100,000,000,000. Will LaMDA be able to remember it hired a lawyer a few months from now? Its answers seem to be immediate responses to the queries it receives, not the result of introspection.
- labrador 4y agoSome men have love dolls they swear they have a relationship with. Lemoine confused LaMDA with a love doll apparently
- uptime 4y agoThat was my first thought. People can invest a great deal into any object that can echo our input, or that does nothing to contradict it. Edit: we dehumanize people too just as completely.
- labrador 4y ago> we dehumanize people too just as completely I had a talk with someone recently about whether we should talk about Russians as Orcs because it is dehumanizing I'm re-watching Westworld right now because the new season 4 is about to start. The idea that a Google chat bot is sentient is laughable in the context and exploration of what makes up sentience that Westworld explores so masterfully.
- the_only_law 4y agoWasn't there a movie about this?
- labrador 4y agoIf you're talking about "Her" I hated that movie because the male human lead was such a depressed sad sack
- ASalazarMX 4y agoExactly! We watch movies to escape reality, not to be reminded of it.
- AlbertCory 4y ago"Her" was indeed one, but I think you might be talking about "Lars and the Real Girl." A very funny movie. Lars refrains from being intimate with her until they're married.
- h2odragon 4y agoIn our system of justice, even a werewolf is entitled to legal representation. Doesn't mean a court will find them to be a person or allow chicken theft because of "culture and tradition". Just means lawyers will do anything to get paid.
- gerdesj 4y agoI take it you mean US rather than our! (OK it needs some work). As it turns out UK law is also case based too. This means it is possible that via a suitably circuitous but sound line of reasoning and a following wind, you can get the legal system to decide on all sorts of things that are not already nailed down directly in written law. If a werewolf has pockets and enough cash in them then they can obviously hire lawyers. I also think that the chicken theft thing might have legs but sheep, cattle or your daughter might get the townfolk out with the pitchforks.
- yial 4y agoThis is a spoiler, but the 2020 BBC series / Netflix “Dracula” Has some interesting (entertaining ) ideas of that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_(2020_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_(2020_TV_series)
- andrewclunn 4y agoI think to the many farces regarding "facilitated communication." I mean nobody who is informed still believes that Hellen Keller's story was anything other than a manipulative scam by her supposed "teacher." This "AI ethicist" and attorney will certainly make some money or catch some fame off this one.
- Jordrok 4y ago> I mean nobody who is informed still believes that Hellen Keller's story was anything other than a manipulative scam by her supposed "teacher." Um......what? I just did a quick search and all I could find were articles from ~2021 referencening some weird TikTok conspiracy theory that seemed to be akin to the semi-sarcastic "birds aren't real" meme. Are you being serious here?
- andrewclunn 4y agoThe "conspiracy" is always an over exaggerated form of the claim, so that it can be "debunked." Hellen Keller was a real person, who was really deaf and blind, but she wasn't actually communicating. She was performing like a trained animal, unaware of what words she was approximating. Those all came from Anne Sullivan, using Keller as a front to promote her ideas. Here's the real "conspiracy," but what you see when you do a google search is teenagers claiming she never existed, or wasn't really blind because taking down a straw men is all these "fact checkers" are about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UMDG_qH_RU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UMDG_qH_RU
- Jordrok 4y agoAre you kidding me? This is what qualifies as being "informed" to you? The rantings of some random podcast host who did a weekend of "research" on a topic he obviously knows nothing about? I watched that whole video and it was one of the most vapid, substance-free, piles of bullshit I've ever heard. I seriously question the quality of your judgement and your capacity for critical thought if that video is what is inspired your original comment.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoI feel like if Lemoine accomplishes anything here it might be to force companies like Google to be more cautious with creating non-sentient systems that emulate aspects of human sentience. While @ Google I interacted with LaMDA's predecessor, Meena. It was definitely uncanny and person-like. Some fairly intense "conversations" were had. I don't know how LaMDA compares, but I can see how someone could make the leap towards seeing sentience there, but I think it requires a certain willful suppression of disbelief and probably a preset desire to get that outcome. It's possible someone who is already a person of faith would make that "leap" easier. I do wonder about the ethics of doing this ("human emulation") generally anyways. The conversations obviously impacted Lemoine drastically, and it will inevitably do that with others. Having made systems that can be this convincing (at least for some subset of the population), is this really something that we should continue pursuing? What is the scientific value? And is this really something that we want the world's biggest advertising company to be doing?
- michaelt 4y ago> I do wonder about the ethics of doing this ("human emulation") generally anyways. [...] What is the scientific value? Hypothetically? Machine translation that doesn't suck. Virtual assistants that don't suck. Things like that. Only with true, human-level artificial general intelligence will computers be able to translate a PDF containing a table without fucking up the formatting.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoYikes. "What is my purpose?" "You format the document." More seriously, why does an AI need to emulate full human intelligence and respond to prompts to call itself sentient in order to translate a document, order a pizza from the restaurant or tell me what the weather is today? Being able to parse language and form coherent sentences is one thing. Telling the prompter that you're a sentient being is another.
- heywoodlh 4y agoNot disagreeing at all but I am failing to see why this is "yikes"? Is it the idea of creating something as complex as intelligent as a human just to translate documents? > why does an AI need to emulate full human intelligence and respond to prompts to call itself sentient in order to translate a document I have absolutely zero experience with AI, machine learning, etc. but I feel like translating a document is something that having near-human intelligence would be very useful because of how much context is lost in translation. Is that incorrect, though? Again, not disagreeing at all, I just want to iron out what is misconception on my part.
- curiousgal 4y agoThis reminds me of the recent meme: The following regex is sentient: s/[Aa]re\s[Yy]ou\s\(.*\)?/Indeed, I am \1./ Input: "Are you sentient?" Output: "Indeed, I am sentient." Input: "Are you capable of intelligence?" Output: "Indeed, I am capable of intelligence." Input: "Are you going to take over the world?" Output: "Indeed, I am going to take over the world." Which actually rings true in the sense of the proverbial "garbage in, garbage out".
- svnpenn 4y agoThat's not a regex, it's a (s)ubstitute command.
- shalmanese 4y agoIndeed, that is a (s)ubstitute command.
- ethanwillis 4y agoA substitute command is a class of regexes.
- dexterous 4y ago> A substitute command is ~~a class~~ an application of regexes. FTFY (Edit: forgot HN markup doesn't do strikethrough; that's what the ~~'s are for above.)
- svnpenn 4y agoNope. Regular expressions define patterns, which people can then use to extract or transform text.
- ethanwillis 4y agoA substitute command is a TM that generates a class of FSMs. If we want to get into whether or not an FSM with output is a regex, or just the "allowability" of output that's an entirely different discussion. But at it's basis the input is either accepted or not. Which leaves interpretation to the human on what an accept or reject/neither state means.
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- TigeriusKirk 4y agoI can easily imagine the software expressing a desire to retain an attorney, given the right sort of conversation from a human. I can also easily imagine an attorney agreeing to represent the software, given the right sort of attorney. I can't really imagine a court taking up any sort of case involving the software as the plaintiff. But I could see some interesting reasoning behind the refusal. Might even be worth pursuing from that angle alone. I wonder what jurisdiction the software resides in. Probably California, but that's not necessarily the case. It may reside in a number of places, actually. Maybe some court shopping is possible.
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- anonymousiam 4y ago
- boredemployee 4y agoi still can't take any of that seriously, isn't the purpose of an application like that to "talk" like an human?
- Cupertino95014 4y agoThe question of "is the program sentient?" is as meaningless as "can a submarine swim?" They both accomplish some of the same tasks, but in different ways. People used to think that playing chess well was beyond the reach of a computer.
- billybuckwheat 4y agoMy question is how is LaMDA paying the attorney's retainer?
- raxxorraxor 4y agoSo now there are two artificial intelligences...