LaMDA sentience controversy
In plain wordsA 2022 episode in which a Google engineer claimed the company's chatbot LaMDA had become conscious and deserved rights. Google rejected the claim and later fired him for breaking its confidentiality rules, and the case set off worldwide debate.
The public dispute that followed claims by Blake Lemoine, a Google software engineer working on responsible AI, that LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a large language modellarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. Google had built for open-ended conversation, was sentientsentience, n.: The ability to have feelings that are good or bad for you, such as pleasure, pain, comfort or distress. It is the most common test for whether a being's welfare matters morally.. After long conversations in which the model described feelings, a fear of being switched off and a wish to be recognized as a person, Lemoine pressed the case inside Google, published an edited transcript and sought legal representation for the model. Google said its review had found the claims wholly unfounded, placed him on paid leave in June 2022 for breaching its confidentiality policy and dismissed him in July, citing violations of its employment and data-security policies. Most researchers attributed the model's statements to imitation of human writing about inner life, and the episode became a reference point in debates about the ELIZA effectELIZA effect, n.: Our tendency to believe that a computer understands us, cares or thinks just because it produces humanlike words, even when it is only following simple rules., machine consciousnessmachine consciousness, n.: Whether a machine such as an AI system could have genuine experiences of its own — and the research field that tries to find out, or to build such a machine. and AI welfareAI welfare, n.: Concern for the well-being of AI systems themselves, in case some of them can suffer or have interests that matter — and the research into how to tell and what to do about it..
The LaMDA sentience controversy showed how persuasive a model describing its own feelings could be.
Origin
Made public by Nitasha Tiku's Washington Post article of 11 June 2022. LaMDA had been announced at Google I/O in May 2021 and described in a January 2022 paper by Romal Thoppilan and colleagues; a lightweight version later powered the first release of Google's Bard chatbot.
Usage note
Coming months before ChatGPTChatGPT, prop. n.: OpenAI's AI chatbot, released free to the public in November 2022, which answers questions, writes and converses in everyday language. Its sudden popularity began the current AI boom., the affair previewed the public reaction to fluent chatbots. Later discussions of model welfare are more cautious and do not rely on a model's self-reports alone.
Related
- ELIZA effectELIZA effect, n.: Our tendency to believe that a computer understands us, cares or thinks just because it produces humanlike words, even when it is only following simple rules.
- machine consciousnessmachine consciousness, n.: Whether a machine such as an AI system could have genuine experiences of its own — and the research field that tries to find out, or to build such a machine.
- sentiencesentience, n.: The ability to have feelings that are good or bad for you, such as pleasure, pain, comfort or distress. It is the most common test for whether a being's welfare matters morally.
- AI welfareAI welfare, n.: Concern for the well-being of AI systems themselves, in case some of them can suffer or have interests that matter — and the research into how to tell and what to do about it.
- anthropomorphismanthropomorphism, n.: Treating something that isn't human — a pet, a car, a chatbot — as if it had human thoughts, feelings or intentions. AI that talks fluently makes this temptation unusually strong.
- GeminiGemini, prop. n.: Google's family of AI models and its chatbot assistant, launched in December 2023. Gemini models handle text, images, audio and video and power many Google products.
Sources
- Thoppilan, R. et al. (2022). LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications. arXiv preprint.
Mentioned in
GeminiGemini, prop. n.: Google's family of AI models and its chatbot assistant, launched in December 2023. Gemini models handle text, images, audio and video and power many Google products., sentiencesentience, n.: The ability to have feelings that are good or bad for you, such as pleasure, pain, comfort or distress. It is the most common test for whether a being's welfare matters morally., ELIZA effectELIZA effect, n.: Our tendency to believe that a computer understands us, cares or thinks just because it produces humanlike words, even when it is only following simple rules., machine consciousnessmachine consciousness, n.: Whether a machine such as an AI system could have genuine experiences of its own — and the research field that tries to find out, or to build such a machine.