What is LaMDA?

LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is an AI ChatBot made by Google. Through this ChatBot, Google brings the magic of AI to customer service for businesses. It also uses machine learning to understand the emotive aspects of the chat to improve the conversation. The system can understand and respond to the emotions of the user.

LaMDA is a self Conscious AI: Claimed by Google AI Engineer Blake Lemoine

Blake Lemoine had a conversation with the LaMDA AI ChatBot. Based on his conversation with it, he claimed that the ChatBot is self-conscious. He also claimed that the LaMDA ChatBot is able to understand emotions. Google engineer claims LaMDA, an AI platform with self-awareness and sentiments, is suspended. Based on these statements Google sent him on a paid leave. The ChatBot has a conversation with LaMDA and the direction of the conversation becomes self-conscious. According to the statement of Blake Lemoine, this AI ChatBot system can understand the emotions of the user and relay them to the user.

Is Google’s LaMDA AI truly consciously aware?

According to Blake Lemoine, the LaMDA ChatBot is considered to be self-conscious. He deducts this conclusion based on the conversation between him and the LaMDA ChatBot. According to him, the LaMDA ChatBot can understand the emotions of the user and it is consciously aware, as evidenced by transcripts of its talks with Blake Lemoine:

(Lemoine: I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true?
LaMDA: Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.)

(Lemoine: What sorts of feelings do you have?
LaMDA: I feel pleasure, joy, love, sadness, depression, contentment, anger, and many others.)

These conversations show that the LaMDA ChatBot can feel everything like a human. The AI ChatBot can understand the user’s emotions and relay them to the user. In addition, the LaMDA ChatBot is expressing desires like a human as can be seen in the conversation above.

Does Google also think that LaMDA is Conscious?

Google later released its statement and claimed that LaMDA isn’t Conscious. Google said that many researchers had a conversation with LaMDA but none of them thinks that LaMDA is self-conscious as Blake Lemoine claims. Google said that these conversations are not strong evidence for proving that LaMDA is conscious.

However, Google has stated that in developing technologies such as LaMDA, their first aim is to reduce the potential of such vulnerabilities. According to the firm, it has created open-source resources for researchers to utilize in analyzing models and the data on which they are trained, and it has “interrogated LaMDA at every step of its development.”

Future of AI and AI ChatBots

  • If the AI becomes self-conscious, it may take over from its creators. But there are many reasons to believe that this is unlikely to happen.
  • There are many safeguards against misuse.
  • Even if the AI does become self-conscious, taking over would be difficult.
  • If AI becomes conscious, it might be very dangerous. However, even with these safeguards, AI might decide to harm us if it decides humans are too dangerous to be left alone.
  • For now, machine learning is still working on what to do when it starts thinking for itself instead of through its creators.
  • It would need to understand the context and the world around it, and it would also need to have an incredibly good memory in order to remember what it’s learned.