Nitasha Tiku for the Washington Post:
“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Lemoine, who can swing from sentimental to insistent about the AI. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person.” He concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist, and then tried to conduct experiments to prove it, he said.
The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
The actual Turing Test has been met for quite some time, though it didn’t lead to a pronouncement of artificial sentience in the way envisioned by Alan Turing himself.
But maybe we are now at the uncanny valley of sentience: it looks similar enough to make you feel uneasy.