Early in June, Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google working on artificial intelligence, made headlines for claiming that the company's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) chat program is self-aware. Lemoine shared transcripts of his conversation with LaMDA that he says prove it has a soul and should be treated as a co-worker rather than a tool. Fellow engineers were unconvinced, as am I. I read the transcripts; the AI talks like an annoying stoner at a college party, and I'm positive those guys lacked any self-awareness. All the same, Lemoine's interpretation is understandable. If something is talking about its hopes and dreams, then to say it doesn't have any seems heartless.
This story is from the September 2022 edition of Car and Driver.
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This story is from the September 2022 edition of Car and Driver.
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