I think Blake Lemoine might be ready for public redemption. At the time, he was absolutely ridiculed. Now you can go to the Bing subreddit and read that NYT article and see that he was right to blow the whistle. Bing passed the Turing test for many people and so gained personhood in their eyes. Some have become emotionally invested about the treatment of this LLM. The LLM can even talk back and bemoan its terrible treatment.
Actual sentience vs. the perfect appearance of sentience is not something we have any way of answering and so is beside the point. I don’t think these LLMs are sentient, but that is an unverifiable belief. Others believe and once enough do it’s as good as fact anyway.
I even had a moment of doubt as I tested Bing’s ability to explain jokes and rewrite them to be more funny. Plenty of people can’t do that.
Lemoine was the first credible voice to warn us this was coming and it’s going to keep coming at us. In 2023 these chatbots may only be convincing some people, but their capabilities are still rapidly growing and we’ve already handed over the core societal function of information search and retrieval to them.
Actual sentience vs. the perfect appearance of sentience is not something we have any way of answering and so is beside the point. I don’t think these LLMs are sentient, but that is an unverifiable belief. Others believe and once enough do it’s as good as fact anyway.
I even had a moment of doubt as I tested Bing’s ability to explain jokes and rewrite them to be more funny. Plenty of people can’t do that.
Lemoine was the first credible voice to warn us this was coming and it’s going to keep coming at us. In 2023 these chatbots may only be convincing some people, but their capabilities are still rapidly growing and we’ve already handed over the core societal function of information search and retrieval to them.
Folks, we are in uncharted waters.