Moving Beyond Mimicry in Artificial Intelligence

Imagine asking a computer to make a digital painting, or a poem--and happily getting what you asked for. Or imagine chatting with it about various topics, and feeling it was a real interaction. What once was science fiction is becoming reality. In June, Google engineer Blake Lemoine told the Washington Post he was convinced Google's AI chatbot, LaMDA, was sentient. "I know a person when I talk to it," Lemoine said. Therein lies the rub: As algorithms are getting increasingly good at producing the kind of "outputs" we once thought were distinctly human, it's easy to be dazzled.