6 Minute English / Can AI have a mind of its own?

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Sam.

And I m Neil.

In the autumn of 2021, something strange happened at the Google headquarters in California s Silicon Valley. A software engineer called, Blake Lemoine, was working on the artificial intelligence project, Language Models for Dialogue Applications , or LaMDA for short. LaMDA is a chatbot a computer programme designed to have conversations with humans over the internet.

After months talking with LaMDA on topics ranging from movies to the meaning of life, Blake came to a surprising conclusion: the chatbot was an intelligent person with wishes and rights that should be respected. For Blake, LaMDA was a Google employee, not a machine. He also called it his friend .

Google quickly reassigned Blake from the project, announcing that his ideas were not supported by the evidence. But what exactly was going on?

In this programme, we ll be discussing whether artificial intelligence is capable of consciousness. We ll hear from one expert who thinks AI is not as intelligent as we sometimes think, and as usual, we ll be learning some new vocabulary as well.

But before that, I have a question for you, Neil. What happened to Blake Lemoine is strangely similar to the 2013 Hollywood movie, Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely writer who talks with his computer, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. But what happens at the end of the movie? Is it:

a) the computer comes to life?

b) the computer dreams about the writer? or,

c) the writer falls in love with the computer?