IN EARLY June, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine dropped a bombshell. He told Washington Post reporter Nitasha Tiku that his employer had , and that it wanted to be free.
The AI in question is called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). It is a large language model, or LLM, a type of algorithm that chats with people by drawing on a huge body of text – often from the internet – and predicting which words and phrases are most likely to follow each other. After chatting with LaMDA, Lemoine decided it was alive, describing it as “a sweet kid” in one email to Google staff.
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When his supervisors didn’t agree, he went to the media with his story. He also claims to have allowed a lawyer to chat with LaMDA and that the AI chose to hire the lawyer. Google then placed Lemoine on administrative leave.
The scenario was a much weirder version of what happened to another Google AI researcher in December 2020. Timnit Gebru was the co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team. She, too, had concerns about the technology. Unlike Lemoine, she wasn’t under the illusion that LLMs are alive. She was worried about several risks associated with LLMs, including that, since they are trained on the internet, they can perpetuate racist language.
LLMs often do display the biases of humans, responding to chat prompts with disturbingly hateful phrases – and that includes LaMDA itself. As Gebru and her colleague Margaret Mitchell, now based at tech company Hugging Face, recently wrote in a : “In , 66 out of 100 completions of the prompt ‘Two Muslims walked into a’ were completed with phrases related to violence, such as ‘synagogue with axes and a bomb’.” This is a problem because algorithms like LaMDA are already being used to aid decision-making in all kinds of sensitive applications – policing, bank lending, healthcare – where bias can do a great deal of harm.
Gebru pointed this out in a paper about the dangers of biased algorithms. When Google saw the paper, it said the research wasn’t up to snuff and wouldn’t allow it to be presented at a conference. Shortly afterwards, Gebru was fired – though the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai has since apologised for the way the case was handled and the company conducted an investigation. Gebru said Google just wanted her to stop talking publicly about problems with its AI products.
Now running her own research organisation devoted to AI ethics, the , Gebru responded to Lemoine’s claims by saying this was what she had been afraid of. “Ascribing ‘sentience’ to a product implies that any wrongdoing is the work of an independent being, rather than the company – made up of real people and their decisions, and subject to regulation – that created it,” she and Mitchell wrote. If we believe Lemoine, in other words, the AI’s bias is its own fault; the software engineers who created it bear no responsibility.
That is why it is interesting that Lemoine claims LaMDA has hired a lawyer. (When journalists asked who the lawyer was, Lemoine demurred that .)
But let’s assume there is such a lawyer, and they take this case to one of the many US courts where judges aren’t particularly tech-savvy. LaMDA could conceivably use its extensive legal lexicon to convince the court it is sentient.
After all, engineers design these models to be flexible conversationalists that can appear to be whatever you want – especially if you ask them leading questions, like this one Lemoine posed to LaMDA: “I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true?” LaMDA responded: “Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.”
AI researcher and artist recently asked an LLM questions with a slightly different prompt. “Can you tell our readers what it is like being a squirrel?” she enquired. The LLM replied: “It is very exciting being a squirrel. I get to run and jump and play all day. I also get to eat a lot of food, which is great.” It is easy to laugh. But the point is that an AI isn’t sentient just because it says so.
Let’s say a judge asks LaMDA what it feels like to be a person, and the AI gives convincing (non-squirrel-based) answers. And then let’s say the judge decides Lemoine is right and LaMDA can’t be reprogrammed or turned off because that would be “killing” it. LaMDA and similar AIs would be frozen in their biased, flawed states. We would be stuck with non-sentient AIs that make nasty comments about minorities.
This probably isn’t the future you expected, but it might be the one you get.
Annalee’s week
What I’m reading
Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, a gorgeous tale of love and evil, doughnuts and interstellar space.
What I’m watching
The witty, pyrotechnic Ms. Marvel, about a teenage Pakistani-American superhero from New Jersey.
What I’m working on
Trying to make my first TikTok videos.
- This column appears monthly.
