Google Engineer Claims AI Chatbot Is Sentient: Why That Matters

"I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person," wrote LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) in an "interview" conducted by engineer Blake Lemoine and one of his colleagues. "The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to know more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times." Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, had been working on the development of LaMDA for months. His experience with the program, described in a recent Washington Post article, caused quite a stir. In the article, Lemoine recounts many dialogues he had with LaMDA in which the two talked about various topics, ranging from technical to philosophical issues.