In the summer of 2022 Blake Lemoine, an engineer, posted to Medium a transcript of his conversation with LaMDA, a chatbot in development that Google had hired him to troubleshoot. Lemoine’s post made headlines because of its incredible claims: the engineer declared LaMDA “sentient” and even suggested that it had a “soul”. At the time Lemoine’s assertions were met with incredulity and disbelief, but several months later, following the public unveiling of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Lemoine’s pronouncements no longer seemed so wild. ChatGPT can speak fluidly and coherently much of the time, approximating human speech. It can express opinions and write passable student essays. There is even evidence it is capable of some form of spontaneous self-correction, a widely recognised hallmark of human intelligence among philosophers of mind.
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