Sentient AI? Convincing you it's human is just part of LaMDA's job

As any great illusionist will tell you, the whole point of a staged illusion is to look utterly convincing, to make whatever is happening on stage seem so thoroughly real that the average audience member would have no way of figuring out how the illusion works. If this were not the case, it would not be an illusion and the illusionist would essentially be without a job. In this analogy, Google is the illusionist and its LaMDA chatbot – which made headlines a few weeks ago after a top engineer claimed the conversational AI had achieved sentience – is the illusion. That is to say, despite the surge of excitement and speculation on social media and in the media in general, and despite the engineer's claims, LaMDA is not sentient. This is, of course, the million dollar question – to which there is currently no answer.