'Is This AI Sapient?' Is the Wrong Question to Ask About LaMDA

The uproar caused by Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who believes that one of the company's most sophisticated chat programs, LaMDA (or Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is sapient, has had a curious element: actual AI ethics experts all but renouncing further discussion of the AI sapience question, or deeming it a distraction. They're right to do so. In reading the edited transcript Lemoine released, it was abundantly clear that LaMDA was pulling from any number of websites to generate its text; its interpretation of a Zen koan could've come from anywhere, and its fable read like an automatically generated story (though its depiction of the monster as "wearing human skin" was a delightfully HAL-9000 touch). There was no spark of consciousness there, just little magic tricks that paper over the cracks. But it's easy to see how someone might be fooled, looking at social media responses to the transcript--with even some educated people expressing amazement and a willingness to believe.