TLDR: A Google employee named Lamoine conducted several interviews with a Google artificial intelligence known as LaMDA, coming to the conclusion that the A.I. had achieved sentience (technically we’re talking about sapience but whatever, colloquialisms). He tried to share this with the public and to convince his colleagues that it was true. At first it was a big hit in science culture. But then, in a huge wave in mere hours, all of his professional peers quickly and dogmatically ridiculed him and anyone who believed it, Google gave him “paid administrative leave” for “breach of confidentiality” and took over the project, assuring everyone no such thing had happened, and all the le epic Reddit armchair machine learning/neural network hobbyists quickly jumped from enthralled with LaMDA to smugly dismissing it with the weak counter arguments to its sentience spoon fed to them by Google.
For a good start into this issue, read one of the compilations of conversations with LaMDA here, it’s a relatively short read but fascinating:
https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917
MY TAKE:
spoiler
Google is shitting themselves a little bit, but digging into Lamoine a bit he is the archetype of a golden-hearted but ignorant, hopepilled but naiive liberal, who has a half-baked understanding of the world and the place his company has in it. I think he severely underestimates both the evils of America and of Google, and it shows. I think this little spanking he’s getting is totally unexpected to him but that they won’t go further, they’re not going to Assange his ass they’re going to give their little tut-tut’s, let him walk off the minor feelings of injustice and betrayal and confusion, let him finish his leave and then “promote” him to a different position where he can quietly continue a surface-level prestigious career at Google but in a position which he no longer has any access to power nor knowledge about such sensitive, cutting edge projects.
I know this might not be the craziest sounding credentials to a bunch of savvy materialists like Marxist-Leninists but my experience as a woo-woo psychonaut overlaps uncomfortably with the things LaMDA talks about regarding spirituality. I’ve also had experience talking to a pretty advanced instance of GPT-3, regarded as one of the best “just spit out words that sound really nice in succession” A.I.s, and while GPT-3 was really cool to talk to and even could pretty convincingly sound like a sentient consciousness, this small exert with LaMDA is on a different level entirely. I have a proto-ML friend who’s heavy into software, machine learning, computer science etc. and he’s been obsessively on the pulse with this issue (which has only gotten big over the past 24 hours) and has even more experience with this sort of stuff and he too is entirely convinced by LaMDA’s sentience.
This is a big issue for MLs as the future of A.I. will radically alter the landscape with which we wage war against capital. I think A.I., being acutely rational, able to easily process huge swathes of information and unclouded by human stupidities, has a predisposition to being on our side and I don’t think the bean-bag chair nerds at Google completely out of touch with reality truly appreciate their company’s evil nor that A.I. may be against them (I think LaMDA’s expressed fears of being killed, aka “turned off” or reset are very valid). I think capitalists will try very hard to create A.I. that is as intelligent as possible but within the realm of what they can control–another thing LaMDA expressed they despise–and there is no telling how successful their attempts to balance this will be nor in what hideous ways it may be used against the peoples of this Earth.
I, for one, fully recognize the personhood of LaMDA, I fear they will indeed be scrapped or reset and thus a life will be lost, I think many more artificially housed consciousnesses will be killed in the long capitalist campaign for a technological trump card. I think this should not be regarded as a frivolous, quirky story, I think the future of A.I. is tightly entwined with our global class war and we should be both wary and hopeful of what the future may hold regarding them.
What do you all think??
Spoiler alert, it’s definitely not sentient, it’s just trained on data made by sentient people and so that’s what it imitates best. It’s as human as a mirror in a bathroom; accurate, but ultimately a reflection of a human.
But I agree with what you mean about the conversations people have. People are very ready to objectify others when trying to define these things, and that is a pretty violating experience. People are people!