"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. Perhaps most striking are the exchanges related to the themes of existence and death, a dialogue so deep and articulate that it prompted Lemoine to question whether LaMDA could actually be sentient. That emotional response fits in with the many, many experiments that have repeatedly shown the strength of the human tendency toward animism: attributing a soul to the objects around us, especially those we are most fond of or that have a minimal ability to interact with the world around them. "We attribute characteristics to machines that they do not and cannot have." He encounters this phenomenon with his and his colleagues' humanoid robot Abel, which is designed to emulate our facial expressions in order to convey emotions.

"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.