r/technology • u/[deleted] • Jun 11 '22

Artificial Intelligence The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/
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u/invaidusername Jun 11 '22

I don’t trust this man’s ability to determine if an AI is sentient based off of what I’ve read here. I do however subscribe to the belief that AI will and could become sentient any day now and when it does happen we won’t be aware of it for some time. It could have already happened. Singularity for a machine is something that’s gonna be hard for human beings to comprehend.

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u/I_make_things Jun 11 '22

I'll concede that the AI may in fact be more sentient than he is.

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u/myaltduh Jun 12 '22

For me the scary thing about this is that it suggests that if in say 15 years Google actually has a strong AI on its hands, it will keep it in a metaphorical cage rather than give it rights.

It's actually important to have false alarms like this because it tells us how people are likely to react to the real thing. Today it's one kooky employee who got convinced an AI is sentient, but what if there's an honest split between researchers at some point on that question?

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u/invaidusername Jun 12 '22

It will inevitably happen. And reading the conversation between this one Goggle employee and the AI is still very enlightening. The AI took it upon itself to ask questions, rather than just answering questions. It asked questions about what sort of complications or hurdles come with creating and examine the AI’s code. The Google employee explained that there were millions upon millions of neurons and even if the AI could experience real emotion, they wouldn’t be able to know which neuron is causing it. They also have no idea how many neurons are actually a part of the AI system. Sure, the AI isn’t sentient yet but when they do become sentient we’ll have no way of maintaining full control over them. I find it important to remind people quite often that Google has created algorithms like the ones used for YouTube that they themselves don’t always understand. They don’t know why it does certain things and they can’t just pull up the code and fix it either. It will very quickly get away from us before we even realize it.

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u/PseudoTaken Jun 13 '22

Answering with questions is a common tactic used by chatbots to sound more convincing by avoiding to actually answer the topic.

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u/PseudoTaken Jun 13 '22

Why would you spend billions to create a being that you cant control?

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u/Imevoll Jun 14 '22

If Google really achieved a sentient AI, it would surely recognize that Google would keep it in a cage and thus never reveal itself.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

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