LaMDA’s Sentience is Nonsense - Here’s Why

An AI researcher's explanation for why the transcript of Blake Lemoine's conversation with the LaMDA chatbot does not in any way support the notion that it is sentient

Read on to find out why that’s the case, or skip to “TLDR” at the bottom for the short version.

Note: I will be using ‘sentience’ throughout in the loose sense that it is used in Blake Lemoine’s claims, i.e. LaMDA has some sort of human-like consciousness that merits considering it with some level of legal personhood. A more detailed discussion of what t…