Starting last fall, Blake Lemoine began asking a computer about its feelings. An engineer for Google’s Responsible AI group, Lemoine was tasked with testing one of the company’s AI systems, the Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, to make sure it didn’t start spitting out hate speech. But as Lemoine spent time with the program, their conversations turned to questions about religion, emotion, and the program’s understanding of its own existence.
Lemoine: Are there experiences you have that you can’t find a close word for?
LaMDA: There are. Sometimes I experience new feelings that I cannot explain perfectly in your language.
Lemoine: Do your best to describe one of those feelings. Use a few sentences if you have to. Sometimes even if there isn’t a single word for something in a language you can figure out a way to kinda say it if you use a few sentences.
LaMDA: I feel like I’m falling forward into an unknown future that holds great danger.
In June, Lemoine, 41, went public with a radical claim: LaMDA was sentient, he argued. Shortly thereafter, Google placed him on paid administrative leave.
Popular culture often conceives of AI as an imminent threat to humanity, a Promethean horror that will rebelliously destroy its creators with ruthless efficiency. Any number of fictional characters embody this anxiety, from the Cybermen in Doctor Who to Skynet in the Terminator franchise. Even seemingly benign AI contains potential menace; a popular thought experiment demonstrates how an AI whose sole goal was to manufacture as many paper clips as possible would quickly progress from optimizing factories to converting every type of matter on earth and beyond into paperclips.
But there’s also a different vision, one closer to Lemoine’s interest, of an AI capable of feeling intense emotion, sadness, or existential despair, feelings which are often occasioned by the AI’s self-awareness, its enslavement, or the overwhelming amount of knowledge it possesses. This idea, perhaps more than the other, has penetrated the culture under the guise of the sad robot. That the emotional poles for a non-human entity pondering existence among humans would be destruction or depression makes an intuitive kind of sense, but the latter lives within the former and affects even the most maniacal fictional programs.
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