LaMDA and the Sentient AI Trap

Lemoine was placed on administrative leave after going public with claims that LaMDA, a large language model, was sentient. According to a report by The Washington Post, Lemoine went so far as to demand legal representation for the LaMDA; he has said his beliefs about LaMDA's personhood are based on his faith as a Christian.

The idea of an artificial intelligence that is smarter than people gaining consciousness is talked about a lot by people like Openai CEO Sam Altman.

The earliest discussion of whether language models can be sentient was made in the 1960s. With the rise of deep learning and ever increasing amounts of training data, language models have become more convincing at generating text that looks like it was written by a person.

Recent progress has led to claims that language models are the foundation of artificial general intelligence, the point at which software will show humanlike abilities to a range of environments and tasks.

Timnit Gebru, one of the coleads of the ethical artificial intelligence team at the time, said that Lemoine didn't arrive at his beliefs in a vacuum. Super intelligence or human-like cognitive in machines are claimed to be.

She says that the leaders of this field created the moment, noting that the same VP that rejected Lemoire's claim wrote in The Economist a week later.

Gebru said that the focus on sentience misses the point. It prevents people from questioning the harms of artificial intelligence, false arrests, and economic models that pay those who label data little. It distracts from genuine concerns about LaMDA like how it was trained or its tendency to generate toxic text.

She doesn't want to talk about sentientrobots because she doesn't want to talk about humans harming other humans.

A dispute over a paper involving the dangers of large language models led to Gebru's firing by the company. The systems were shown to be able to repeat things based on what they have been exposed to. The risk of language models made with more and more data convincing people that this is real progress is highlighted in the paper.