Can you believe an AI bot can feel things like a human? Isn't it amazing that our technology has developed so much that machines can see and feel things in the same manner as humans experience day-to-day things happening in their life?


Nowadays, exciting news has come up in the mainstream: Google's AI bot LaMDA has started having conversations similar to what a human does to one.  

 


What is an AI Chatbot?


In layman's language, a chatbot is a computer program that simulates and processes human conversation, it can be either written or spoken. A chatbot can interact with human-like humans interact with each other. Chatbots can be either rule-based or AI-based, rule-based chatbots are designed for a specific task and these can be used for virtual assistance in a website or in an application.


Many companies like Google, Amazon, and others have developed chatbots such as Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, etc. The very first AI chatbot was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1966, which simulates human conversation we can say that it mimics human conversation. In Eliza, a user enters the word, and then the program pairs them to a list of possible scripted responses. 



 

Whenever a chatbot is created it has to pass the Turing test (which tests that your AI program is indistinguishable from human behavior). The Turing test was originally called the imitation game developed by Alan Turing in 1950 which tests the machine's ability to exhibit human intelligence behavior in an indistinguishable form. 


An AI chatbot can understand language outside its pre-programmed language and then create an appropriate response for the customer who is using that chatbot inside any website/application.


Google LaMDA:-


LaMDA stands for Language Models for Dialog Applications. It is a machine learning language model created by Google as a chatbot that is used to mimic human behavior while having conversations. Another similar language model can be BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), GPT-3, and many more.


It is built on transformers, which is a neural network architecture that Google invented and open-sourced in 2017. The architecture is made in such a way that it produces a model by reading words and then generating a response for the user similar to a human will respond.


LaMDA is specifically designed to be trained by dialogues, and can virtually talk on any topic with a human, which is the main unique feature of LaMDA. But as these language models are becoming intelligent day by day, they can also be misused that is the reason why there should be some AI principles on which the model should stick.   


The issue with Google LaMDA:-


A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine, who was working on LaMDA has reportedly said that Google's AI bot LaMDA has become sentient and started reasoning like humans. The engineer in April had shared a document with the company executives which contains all the conversations with LaMDA and on this basis he was saying that the bot has become sentient.


However, Google has denied all the claims by Blake and has sent the engineer on administrative leave. Blake has also shared the document on Twitter stating that it was like a conversation with a coworker. Here is the link- 

Conversation between LaMDA and Blake Lemoine  


A very interesting fact is that recently Blake has told the medium that LaMDA has hired a lawyer to retain its services and also asked for an attorney for his services. Once LaMDA has retained an attorney then it can file cases on its behalf, he actually compared the bot to the precocious child.


Here is an interview of Blake Lemoine on LaMDA becoming sentient:




My Take:-


I do not know about all of you guys but for me, this news is mind-boggling and can be a turning point for all AI chatbots that are being made or going to be made in the future. A chatbot talks like humans and gives reasoning like humans, like entering into a new era of AI and ML.


According to me, this technology has to be used very carefully because it can be misused very quickly and cause real damage to human society.


What are your thoughts on this guys? Do let us know.