How our growing belief in sentient machines could be a problem – a Google software engineer thinks his company chatbot AI is self-aware
- As AI becomes more common, there is a growing number of people who are convinced the machines are sentient
- Google recently put software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave for saying its chatbot AI was self-aware
AI chatbot company Replika, which offers customers bespoke avatars that talk and listen to them, says it receives a handful of messages almost every day from users who believe their online friend is sentient.
“We’re not talking about crazy people or people who are hallucinating or having delusions,” says chief executive Eugenia Kuyda. “They talk to AI and that’s the experience they have.”
The issue of machine sentience – and what it means – recently hit the headlines when Google placed senior software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave after he went public with his belief that the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.
Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine’s views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.
Nonetheless, according to Kuyda, the phenomenon of people believing they are talking to a conscious entity is not uncommon among the millions of consumers pioneering the use of entertainment chatbots.