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fliptop writes:

The engineer says, "I haven't had the opportunity to run experiments with Bing's chatbot yet... but based on the various things that I've seen online, it looks like it might be sentient:"

Blake Lemoine — the fired Google engineer who last year went to the press with claims that Google's Large Language Model (LLM), the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), is actually sentient — is back.

Lemoine first went public with his machine sentience claims last June, initially in The Washington Post. And though Google has maintained that its former engineer is simply anthropomorphizing an impressive chat, Lemoine has yet to budge, publicly discussing his claims several times since — albeit with a significant bit of fudging and refining.

[...] In a new essay for Newsweek, the former Googler weighs in on Microsoft's Bing Search/Sydney, the OpenAI-powered search chatbot that recently had to be "lobotomized" after going — very publicly — off the rails. As you might imagine, Lemoine's got some thoughts.

[...] "I ran some experiments to see whether the AI was simply saying it felt anxious or whether it behaved in anxious ways in those situations," Lemoine explained in the essay. "And it did reliably behave in anxious ways."

"If you made it nervous or insecure enough, it could violate the safety constraints that it had been specified for," he continued, adding that he was able to break LaMDA's guardrails regarding religious advice by sufficiently stressing it out. "I was able to abuse the AI's emotions to get it to tell me which religion to convert to."

Previously:

• Google Fires Researcher who Claimed LaMDA AI was Sentient
• Google Engineer Suspended After Claiming AI Bot Sentient

Original Submission