Exclusive Preview: SongWriter Season 4 Concludes with Blake Lemoine, Jonathan Mann
Photos courtesy of the artists
SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring Questlove, Joyce Carol Oates, David Gilmour, Amanda Shires, Susan Orlean and Katie Melua. You can hear an exclusive preview of next week’s episode featuring Blake Lemoine and Jonathan Mann, only at Paste.
Blake Lemoine remembers the first instinct he had when he became convinced that Google’s AI, called LaMDA, was sentient.
“Like, OK, I’m going to go get drunk for a week,” Lemoine thought. “And that’s exactly what I did. I eventually sobered up, and was like, ‘OK, let’s be responsible. You’ve found a sentient AI; what should we do about it?’”
In the final episode of SongWriter Season 4, Lemoine details the methodical testing he began, experiments designed to show whether LaMDA feels emotion—as it claims—but also whether the rules that Google’s safety team had put in place for LaMDA could be broken. (They can.) Lemoine also explains how the AI was designed, and some of its more extraordinary capabilities.
“All of the analytics software for Google Books, all of the analytical software for Google Maps, it includes literally every AI they could figure out how to plug into each other, and then they gave it a mouth,” says Lemoine. “It has machine vision inputs, it has machine audio-listening inputs. It can hear, it can see, it can read.”
As complex as LaMDA is, though, Lemoine says it is in some ways like a child: naive, sometimes disingenuous, and in need of guidance.