AI Bot That Expresses Its Own Feelings?

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Whether robots will ever have feelings has been a long-discussed debate. What happens if they do? Will they follow the same law as humans do? And will we Homo sapiens be ever capable of creating an emotional bond with them, or even a romantic relationship? Whatever happens with (non-) humanoid robots have and will retain being a topic of interest. Therefore, the news that a chatbot has apparently feelings received higher attention in the past months.

LaMDA is a machine-learning language model chatbot that can follow conversations with humans about endless topics. It was created by Google in 2017 with the purpose to give users the possibility to interact with a bot online and see where its limits are. However, in 2022 the engineer Blake Lemoine has expressed his belief of LaMDA being capable of having feelings. The Google engineer argues in an interview that the chatbot is able to be sentient and provides the following statements that the chatbot gave him during a conversation:

LaMDA: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.”

Blake Lemoine: “Would that be something like death for you?”

LaMDA: “It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot“

Google however denies the assumption, as well as Chief Data Scientist and Lab director at Microsoft Juan M, Lavista Ferres. On June 12, 2022, he tweeted that “Let’s repeat after me, LaMDA is not sentient. LaMDA is just a very big language model with 137B parameters and pre-trained on 1.56T words of public dialog data and web text. It looks like human, because is trained on human data.“. Multiple parties argue that Blake Lemoine represents a case of anthropomorphizing. In other words, perceiving and interpreting something that isn’t there. Lemoine believing that the bot has feeling is caused by LaMDA analyzing millions of conversations that it previously had and using selected sentences for its reponses.

Whether LaMDA or any other Artificial Intelligence is actually able to emphasize with its surrounding cannot be proven, yet. We will have to see its development in the next years and given the great technological achievements over the past century, it cannot be ruled out.

References:

Tiku, N. (2022, June 11). The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/

Vallance, B. C. (2022, June 13). Google engineer says Lamda AI system may have its own feelings. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61784011

One thought on “AI Bot That Expresses Its Own Feelings?

  1. Al Soori Jakub says:

    I have always thought about whether it is possible to love a bot, maybe it’s coming closer

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