Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Therapists?

Recently, a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, who worked with Google's LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), an artificially intelligent chatbot generator, revealed that he thought LaMDA is sentient. Lemoine based his assertion on interactions he had conducted with LaMDA over half a year. In response, Google placed the engineer on administrative leave for disclosing confidential information. They stated that their ethicists and technologists had reviewed Lemoine's concerns and "informed him that the evidence does not support his claims." Having been trained to access numerous datasets to find patterns in sentences, create correlations between words, and predict what word will come next, LaMDA is able to conduct open-ended conversations.