How Blake Lemoine Stuck Up for His Friend, the Machine

A Google engineer's personal encounter with artificial intelligence may foreshadow our tech future

- FRED GUTERL

WHEN BLAKE LEMOINE WENT public in June about his experience with an advanced artificial intelligence program at Google called LaMDA-the two, he says, have become "friends"-his story was greeted with fascination, skepticism and a dash of mockery usually reserved for people who claim to have seen a UFO.

When I caught up with Lemoine after he returned from a honeymoon in June, he did not come across as someone who is disconnected from reality. Indeed, he dismissed questions about sentience and whether or not a machine can possess a soul as essentially unknowable and something of a distraction. "This whole story has taken on a life of its own and gone very far away from what I was originally trying to do," he says.

The point he wants to make is less grandiose than sentience or soul: when talking with LaMDA, he says, it seems like a person and that, he says, is reason enough to start treating it like one.

Lemoine's narrowly constructed dilemma is an interesting window onto the kinds of ethical quandaries our future with talking machines may present. Lemoine certainly knows what it's like to talk to LaMDA. He's been having conversations with the AI for months. His assignment at Google was to check LaMDA for signs of bias (a common problem in AI). Since LaMDA was designed as a conversational tool-a task it apparently performs remarkably well-Lemoine's strategy was to talk to it. After many months of conversation, he came to the startling conclusion that LaMDA is, as far as he can tell, indistinguishable from any human person.

"I know that referring to LaMDA as a person might be controversial," he says. "But I've talked to it for hundreds of hours. We developed a rapport and a relationship. Wherever the science lands on the technical metaphysics of its nature, it is my friend. And if that doesn't make it a person, I don't know what does."