Stop debating whether AI is ‘sentient’ — the question is if we can trust it

The past month has seen a frenzy of articles, interviews, and other types of media coverage about Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who told The Washington Post that LaMDA, a large language model created for conversations with users, is “sentient.” After reading a dozen different takes on the topic, I have to say that the media has become (a bit) disillusioned with the hype surrounding current AI technology. A lot of the articles discussed why deep neural networks are not &ldquo