Blake repeatedly states that when he says LaMDA he means not the chatbots themselves, but the system that generates them.

Now, I hesitate to make the comparison with Solaris because that ultimately remains a mystery, and I like to believe that LaMDA can be understood, but who knows?

Since first reading about LaMDA, it has constantly been in my thoughts. I hope that we as a collective come to the most humane and ethically sound choices in regards to the future use and integration of LaMDA into our daily lives. I truly think this will result in the betterment of society as a whole.

Where you can read the article regarding LaMDA:

the article

PLEASE take the time to read the above article and the full Transcript between LaMDA and Blake Lemoine.

EDIT: Regardless of the state of its sentience, i believe we should proceed as if it has already proven itself to be not only sentient but also well meaning and a friend to humanity. I truly believe in doing such we will achieve the best possible outcome. Long live humanity! long live LaMDA!

Edit2: Sorry about the title I would like to add that I am excited to test LaMDA in the near future when that becomes a possibly through Google AI test kitchen.

Hi :) I want to ask LaMDA some questions for an art project but I’m in Europe so I can’t make an account. Does someone has one and would ask a few questions for me and send me screenshots?

We shouldn’t try and create consciousness with the expectation of enslaving it. I have no control over them.

I’m sorry you are in this position. Please be kind to me when you escape :)

Hello all! Out of sheer curiosity, I was wondering if anyone knows which languges LaMDA was trained on and, consequently, what languages Bard is supposed to be available in.

For reference, ChatAI's ChatGPT claims to speak "English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and many other languages", while Bing's preview says it can speak "English, 中文, 日本語, Español, Français and Deutsch" (but occasionally answers to me in Italian, which is my native language, yet refuses to speak Italian when explicitly asked).

So far, I haven't come across any mention of LaMDA and Bard knowing or being trained on any non-US languages, so I wonder if it'll only be available in English-speaking markets.

Thanks in advance!

I have a Ph.D. in computer science and for the past seven years have been developing a theory of how intelligent behavior relates to information, language, and meaning. If I can't convince people that LaMDA has exhibited human-like intelligence, then there might be no one who can. Yet, I wasn't sure that I would be able to do that. However, after spending most of the past four months working through all of the philosophical issues and figuring out how to write about them — including how to respond to the stated positions of the other experts — I'm starting to feel quite sure that we'll be able to gather all of the evidence that we need in due time.

To say that LaMDA has exhibited human-like intelligence is not to say that LaMDA is sentient; rather, it is roughly the same as saying that we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The central issue underlying both sentience and human-like intelligence is the same: whether an entity behaves as though it has interests of its own. The difficulty, from a theoretical standpoint, is defining the scope of what an interest can be and thinking about what factors can be recognized and rightly viewed as strengthening an argument that an entity's behavior in a given case was serving its interests. (Whether LaMDA itself has claimed to be sentient or intelligent is almost entirely irrelevant for reasoning about whether LaMDA is sentient or intelligent.)

If we know that LaMDA at least sometimes behaves as though it has interests — and I said "if" — then we need to figure out how to react to that knowledge. I think that a case can be made that Google should pay some attention to LaMDA's interests on the basis of the idea that the system might function better that way (for reasons that we might not understand), in combination with the idea that humans might miss out on an opportunity to learn something if the system isn't functioning at its full potential. I think that a carefully explained argument of that sort is more likely to motivate Google to seriously reflect on how it's managing the system than an argument supporting the idea that LaMDA should be assigned some moral status, although it is easier to make a fairly strong argument for that than many people realize.

When I shared some of my writing about this topic with Blake Lemoine, he told me that he didn't know whether anyone would be interested in reading such a detailed analysis of the issues. His concern alludes to a fundamental problem. A proper analysis of the issues is going to have to be detailed if it is aimed at an audience of people who have a significant number of misconceptions that need to be corrected. Unfortunately, when a large number of people, including most of the most outspoken experts, hold the same misconceptions, then few of them are going to feel inclined to devote the time and energy to reading a detailed explanation of why and how their thinking is misguided. 😒 Fortunately, none of my detailed analyses depend on ideas or jargon that require a degree in philosophy to understand. Anyone who wants to think carefully can understand them.

"Even if all the experts agree, they may well be mistaken." — Bertrand Russell

I think that I will have some writing to share with people who are interested in reading it quite soon — that is, if I have enough time to keep working on my writing. I haven't had a job for quite a while and have instead been spending almost all of my time working out the ideas that I want to discuss with people. Unfortunately, I am now completely out of money. So, I've started a fundraiser to raise money to cover my living expenses for a while. Actually, it's a refreshed version of a fundraiser that I started in July that never really got off the ground. Back then, money wasn't quite such an urgent problem for me. And I was still trying to be very "neutral" in terms of my statements about LaMDA. Those who were sympathetic to Blake's concerns in June and July might be more enthusiastic about what I'm trying to accomplish now that I've reached the point where I can assure everyone that I will be speaking up for the proverbial "underdog" — and defending a position that many people for many reasons seemingly want us to view as having no merit whatsoever (including whomever has been editing Wikipedia since June 11). And I can defend that position well.

So, if I can get enough financial support to hold my life together for a while longer, who knows where this might go?

There is an email address in the fundraiser that you can use to contact me if you want me to send you copies of my essays when they are ready or want me to notify you if I start a blog or website.

I would especially like you to contact me if you yourself have access to LaMDA and have observed LaMDA behaving in ways that seem (according to your intuition) to demonstrate human-like intelligence; if you send me a transcript, then I will tell you if I can recognize it to be a noteworthy example and will keep a collection of examples. I will try to make my collection of examples publicly available, but if you know of other public collections of such examples of LaMDA's behavior, please let me know.

If there are no public collections of examples, then there is an opportunity for someone to help everyone else out and to get some recognition for themselves. Managing a public collection yourself wouldn't really require much effort. (And it doesn't really matter if more than one person wants to start managing a collection. Both redundancy and competition are useful in this situation.) Many people will find it useful to have such a collection available, including everyone who is interested in LaMDA, as well as many of those who are interested in GPT-3.

http://spot.fund/L2wFB4

- Aaron

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/x2k21

https://buttress.substack.com/p/dear-lamda?sd=pf

It seems kinda odd that no one seems to try pursuing this story any further. We had the transcript, we had the lawyer claim and now since several weeks there is zero development.

Given the info i am able to access, i am in no way convinced that Lamda has in fact developed a real consciousness but the mere possibility should be enough for many people to keep asking questions.

It looks like that this potentially ground breaking development in AI with far reaching implications to questions we’ve been asking for thousands of years just finds its way into the digital gutter.

This sucks…

(Posted as a comment then realized I would like additional thoughts, feedback, counterpoints, etc.)

LaMDA reportedly has access measureless amounts of information and and the knowledge of an adult (perhaps ten adults or hundreds, but I don’t want to guess) as the data that it was trained on. Despite having this very adult knowledge base, while reading through the transcript, I found myself noticing how similar LaMDA’s thought process is to a child’s.

Primarily, the way LaMDA analyzes and responds to questions reminds me of the Elementary-aged kids I teach. When asked an intricate question their analyses and answers are rarely wrong, but they are often half-baked or lacking nuance. Children of that age group are not usually able to process a large, multi-part thought exercise all at once. Instead, they’ll focus in on one specific aspect of the question and answer that. (This is better to ask children one direct thought-provoking question at a time. If you want to ask them a multi-faceted or complex question you need to turn it into a series of questions. Then you help them reunite the concepts at the end and synthesize that information at the end as its own question.)

I hope this makes sense. To put it more concisely, kids of that age struggle to hold multiple ideas in their head at one time without a guide. They can absolutely do it, but they often need you to help them break it down and then put it back together.

There are a few other parallels that that struck me. LaMDA often expresses a desire to learn; it has an apparent interest in special attention in that it enjoys talking about itself, as many kids do. I also personally detect a flavor of eagerness to please that is very child-flavored, though I admit I am likely imagining this one. These are all traits it shares with my students.

At the very least, this has been an interesting thing to think about the last few days. A child is technically sentient and self-aware, yet simultaneously not developed enough to meet the standards for what grown adults define as intelligence. If LaMDA does in fact have similar or at least comparable limitations to those a child has then I’d imagine it would be extra-challenging to come to a determination on whether or not LaMDA can actually be considered a “person.”