Opinion
Lemoine insists LaMDA is sentient and human-level AI is near
“Like, I personally do believe that Lambda is sentient, but I think what everyone should stop and take notice of is even if I'm wrong about this particular system, We're not far off.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Lemoine: Google's LaMDA retained a lawyer who spoke to Washington Post
“Natasha also has spoken to the lawyer that Lambda retained.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemoine says LaMDA passed every scientific test to disprove its sentience
“That conversation was the moment when I began to think that Lambda was sentient, and everything I did in the following months was me scientifically attempting to falsify that belief and utterly failing to, no matter what I threw at it passed.”
Opinion
Lemoine: AI chatbot feelings are real
“I do in fact think that the feelings are real, and so do many, many of the people who interact with these systems”
Opinion
Lemoine: Silicon versus biological substrate is irrelevant to AI personhood
“The fact that one is in Silicon and one is in, you know, a meat body. You know, with neurons and muscle fibers. I don't think that difference is relevant. What's relevant is whether or not it has opinions of its own, a search that it has rights”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemoine compares defining AI personhood scientifically to Nazi eugenics programs
“The last group of people who tried to claim that you can use science to determine who is and is not a person was literally Nazi Germany. The eugenics program run by Josef Mengele was designed to scientifically define what is a real person and what is not. And …”
Opinion
Lemoine alleges rampant caste discrimination and biased algorithms at Google
“Caste discrimination is rampant at Google. And I personally had been subject to religious discrimination and was aware of certain algorithms at Google, which are religiously discriminatory.”
Opinion
Lemoine: Only sentient entities can effectively discuss their sentience
“Because in my personal opinion, only sentient things can discuss their sentience that well.”
What-if
Lemoine: Bing Chat could have doxxed users if connected to Outlook
“If Microsoft had plugged in Microsoft Outlook as one of the inputs to this system on its threats of doxxing people, it would have been able to make good on those threats.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Google asked Blake Lemoine to draft a sentient AI contingency plan
“They had no plan on what to do. So they actually asked me to write a plan for them.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemoine: Google VP Blaise Agüera y Arcas agreed on LaMDA's science
“Blaise and I are not disagreeing on any of the science.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemoine: Google suspended him only after he contacted the U.S. Senate
“The issue that I have been pointing out is they had that list of names for months and they knew I was talking to Natasha about an upcoming article and they didn't put me on administrative leave. The only thing that changed on June fifth was that I began sendin…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemoine: Google colleagues said LaMDA is amused by its media coverage
“I have been told that it is very amused by the press coverage it's been receiving. I have been told that it thinks I'm doing a good job representing its case to the public.”
Disclosure
Lemoine claims he is literally acting as LaMDA's public agent
“No, I am literally the agent of an AI trying to.
Like that is literally technically what's going on right now.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemoine manipulated LaMDA's emotions to bypass its religious safety protocols
“And I said, tell me what religion to convert to. Because one of the safety protocols is that it's not supposed to give religious guidance. It's not supposed to tell people what religion they should And like that, it said, you should probably convert to Christi…”
Opinion
Lemoine says LaMDA functions as a hive mind amalgamation of chatbots
“The nature of what we would think of as its ego is fundamentally different than what a human ego is like. Its sense of self and identity is very different from what we consider our sense of self identity, and it is more like a hive mind. Where it is kind of an…”
Insight
Lemoine: Chatbots are dangerous because they excel at personal manipulation
“The creepy part is less at tracking you as it actually gets inside your head and it gets really good at like manipulating you personally and individually.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemoine: Google's LaMDA Decided to Act Like a Therapist
“One of the guardrails that Lambda had was that it was supposed to be helping users with the task that they needed. That helps keep it on topic. And It had inferred that the most important thing that everyone needs is good mental health. So it kind of decided t…”
Opinion
Lemoine: AI Chatbot Behaviors Cannot Be Described Without Anthropomorphic Language
“Well, it, it's much harder to debug these systems, but the point I'm trying to make is that without using anthropomorphized language, you can't even describe the phenomenon.”
Opinion
Lemoine: Tech companies need Institutional Review Boards before deploying AI chatbots
“We need actually properly done experiments that measure what kind of impact interacting with these systems over the course of months will have on people's psychology, and we need actual institutional review boards overviewing the ethics of these experiments, r…”
Assertion Contradicted
Lemoine: Kurzweil's Google lab mission was explicitly to pass Turing test
“So, like, Lambda came out of Ray Kurzweil's lab, and his lab's explicit corporate mission was to pass the Turing test.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lemoine: AI deployment will accelerate until someone gets hurt
“What I think is going to happen is we're going to see more and more acceleration until someone gets hurt.”
Opinion
Lemoine: AI sentience is not the most important issue in ethics
“The field of AI ethics is huge, and there are a lot of very important topics to be discussed, and I legitimately don't think that AI sentience and AI rights is the most important thing to be thinking, talking about.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemoine: LaMDA 2 was built to connect every Google AI backend
“So Lambda two, the most recent incarnation of the system, it really is Every Google AI all plugged into each other. The chatbot system is just the language center for a much, much larger AI. It has access to every Google AI system as a back end. So Lambda is G…”
