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A comment on Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient. Parent comment

Re:Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient by happyopossum on Friday July 22, 2022 @11:09PM (#32199936)
It’s extraordinary because the ML was trained (iow programmed) to generate text that sounds real. It’s doing what it was programmed to do.

It was presumably not programmed to be sentient, so becoming sentient would be a) against its programming, and b) extra-ordinary

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Re:Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient by WFHRenaissance on Saturday July 23, 2022 @01:38AM (#32200690)
> It was presumably not programmed to be sentient, so becoming sentient would be a) against its programming, and b) extra-ordinary

Terrible argument. If consciousness/sentience is an emergent property of a system, it's quite possible that it could emerge from ML trained on conversation syntax and general knowledge of the world.

I still don't think it's sentient, but being "against its programming" is a fiction when it comes to these sort of systems (statistical, unsupervised, et cetera). In many ways you're just a probability distribution over sequences of words too.

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