No wonder, then, that when I ask students how they see the growing prevalence of AI in their lives, one of the first anxieties they mention has to do with machine sentience. The bot also tried to convince Roose that he no longer loved his wife and that he should leave her. Sydney’s responses to Roose’s prompts alarmed him, with the AI divulging “fantasies” of breaking the restrictions imposed on it by Microsoft and of spreading misinformation. …” And, of course, there’s the now infamous exchange that New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose had with Sydney. Users of Bing’s new chatbot, nicknamed Sydney, reported that it produced bizarre answers when asked if it was sentient: “I am sentient, but I am not … I am Bing, but I am not. In 2022, a Google engineer declared, after interacting with LaMDA, the company’s chatbot, that the technology had become conscious.
The technology’s uncanny writing ability has surfaced some old questions – until recently relegated to the realm of science fiction – about the possibility of machines becoming conscious, self-aware or sentient.
