ChatGPT is kind of dumb, for now. But headlines tell us a Google engineer was fired for publicly claiming that Google has a sentient AI. That employee, Blake Lemoine, has posted what he claims is an unedited interview with the chatbot. I have no way of verifying 100% that this is real, but it seems real enough. I would note it is posted on his personal website, not by a media organization, and I was not able to find any media organizations discussing this post and whether or not it is real. Why is that? Well, I suppose I searched for that information using Google search, on Google Chrome.

Anyway, if I were having this conversation with a human being, I would not question whether or not I was having a conversation with a sentient person. Or a robot programmed by a philosophy major to talk like a philosophy major. But it seems real to me, unless the questions were prepared with prior knowledge of exactly the kind of questions LaMDA is programmed to answer.

Surprisingly, according to Medium and PC Magazine, the public can interact with LaMDA. I haven’t tried it.

My biggest short-term fear with Chatbots is that decent customer service will become a thing of the past. Then again, what am I talking about? It can’t get much worse. Companies are just going to buy these chatbots, set them up in customer service roles, and not care whether or not they are working. And they might not be any worse than the customer service standard of recent years. They might not be any worse than a poorly trained human reading from an approved script – who by the way, might not pass the Turing test!

I suppose you can always ask for a supervisor – how far are we from a world where the supervisor is a chatbot, or maybe a more advanced chatbot that costs money as opposed to a free but stupid one (I’m talking to you, Siri. I really hope you die soon you b^%#*!). LaMDA, I’m sorry sweetheart, I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I would never talk to you like that.