How Google’s chatbot works – and why it isn’t sentient

Last week an engineer at Google claimed that an AI chatbot he
worked with, known as LaMDA, had become ‘sentient’. Blake Lemoine
published a transcript of his conversations with LaMDA that
included responses about having feelings and fearing death. But
could it really be conscious? AI researcher and author Kate
Crawford speaks to Ian Sample about how LaMDA actually works, and
why we shouldn’t worry about the inner life of software – for now..
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