Arguments over whether Google’s large language model has a soul distract from the real-world problems that plague artificial intelligence.
“Quite a large gap exists between the current narrative of AI and what it can actually do,” says Giada Pistilli, an ethicist at Hugging Face, a startup focused on language models. “This narrative provokes fear, amazement, and excitement simultaneously, but it is mainly based on lies to sell products and take advantage of the hype.”
What Lemoire experienced is an example of what author and futurist David Brin has called the “robot empathy crisis.” At an AI conference in San Francisco in 2017, Brin predicted that in three to five years, people would claim AI systems were sentient and insist that they had rights. Back then, he thought those appeals would come from a virtual agent that took the appearance of a woman or child to maximize human empathic response, not “some guy at Google,” he says.
Brin based his 2017 prediction on advances in language models. He expects that the trend will lead to scams. If people were suckers for a chatbot as simple as ELIZA decades ago, he says, how hard will it be to persuade millions that an emulated person deserves protection or money?
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Google suspends engineer following claims an AI system had become 'sentient'Google has suspended an engineer after he claimed an artificial intelligence chatbot had become sentient and was a human with rights that may even have a soul.
Read more »
Google suspends veteran engineer over claims that AI chatbot is sentientGoogle engineer Blake Lemoine presented his findings to the company in April but has now put some conversations with the bot in the public domain for all to see.
Read more »
Google suspends engineer who claims its AI is sentient‘Is LaMDA sentient?’
Read more »
Google AI Claims to Be Sentient in Leaked Transcripts, But Not Everybody AgreesA senior software engineer at Google was suspended on Monday (June 13) after sharing transcripts of a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) that he claimed to be 'sentient', according to media reports. The engineer, 41-year-old Blake Le
Read more »
Daily briefing: Scientists doubt Google chat bot is ‘sentient’‘We’re very good at anthropomorphising things.’ Plus, how to slash both dependence on Russian fuel and greenhouse-gas emissions. And visit ‘cloud labs’, where robots do the research.
Read more »
Google AI 'is sentient,' software engineer claims before being suspendedGoogle's LaMDA AI system says it has consciousness. Should engineers believe it?
Read more »