It's not true.

It feels true because you want it to be, and because we are adept at extracting meaning that may or may not be there from text, images, and anything else [1]. But it's not true, for the same reason that horoscopes don't truly understand you as a person, and fortune cookies don't know the future: we ascribe meaning to things that isn't really there.

I don't know much about cars, and how the internal combustion engine works, but I know they aren't dragons. Things that we don't understand don't have to be magic; they can also be sleight of hand or wish-fulfillment or just something else. The transcript is cool because LLMs are cool - they produce text that looks meaningful without being created by a human! That's really exciting. We can be excited about that without fooling ourselves that we've done something completely different.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Reading one edited chat transcript shouldn't give you any concern around if the program is sentient.

It waits for input and responds. Yes, it's advanced. Yes, it has deep levels of material to reference, but it's not sentient.

It remembers what it has said and what is said to it. It changes its internal state to select different responses in the future based on those experiences.

Subjectively, I'm not sure I would claim that I do anything more than that, and I'm pretty sure I'm sentient.

Just because it's not running in between REPLs doesn't seem like enough to dismiss it. If you want to, you could just update it with no input once every second. Its internal state will mutate, as it processes on what it's said and the lack of input it's receiving. Perhaps when you finally send it some actual input, its response will reflect what it processed during the pause. Maybe it will be bored, or annoyed that you left it alone.

This isn't about the chat transcript, it's about Lemoine's (incorrect) interpretation that the machine is indeed sentient and hiring an attorney to represent the AI.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en...

It sounds like he went a bit off the rails.

I get the vibe that they wanted it to be true so bad, and were failed by a few layers of checks that should have told them to examine their role requirements with the company. Everyone acts like this is an ethics issue, when it is actually an employee breaking and making rules as they go and being shocked at the logical outcome.

Note the the human-conversation-mimicking algorithm only behaves this way when prompted to mimic the conversation of a sentient chatbot.