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?

... c) the writer falls in love with the computer.

OK, Neil, I’ll reveal the answer at the end

of the programme. Although Hollywood is

full of movies about robots coming to life,

Emily Bender, a professor of linguistics and

computing at the University of Washington,

thinks AI isn’t that smart. She thinks the

words we use to talk about technology,

phrases like ‘machine learning’, give a

false impression about what

computers can and can’t do.

Here is Professor Bender discussing

another misleading phrase, ‘speech

recognition’, with BBC World Service

programme, The Inquiry:

If you talk about ‘automatic speech

recognition’, the term ‘recognition’

suggests that there's something

cognitive going on, where I think a

better term would be automatic transcription.

That just describes the input-output

relation, and not any theory or wishful

thinking about what the computer is

doing to be able to achieve that.

Using words like ‘recognition’ in relation

to computers gives the idea that

something cognitive is happening – something

related to the mental processes of

thinking, knowing, learning and understanding.

But thinking and knowing are human,

not machine, activities. Professor Benders

says that talking about them in connection

with computers is wishful thinking -

something which is unlikely to happen.

The problem with using words in this

way is that it reinforces what

Professor Bender calls, technical

bias – the assumption that the computer

is always right. When we encounter

language that sounds natural, but is

coming from a computer, humans

can’t help but imagine a mind behind

the language, even when there isn’t one.

In other words, we anthropomorphise

computers – we treat them as if they

were human. Here’s Professor Bender

again, discussing this idea with

Charmaine Cozier, presenter of BBC

World Service’s, the Inquiry.

So ‘ism’ means system, ‘anthro’ or ‘anthropo’

means human, and ‘morph’ means shape...

And so this is a system that puts the

shape of a human on something, and

in this case the something is a computer.

We anthropomorphise animals all the time,

but we also anthropomorphise action figures,

or dolls, or companies when we talk about

companies having intentions and so on.

We very much are in the habit of seeing

ourselves in the world around us.

And while we’re busy seeing ourselves

by assigning human traits to things that

are not, we risk being blindsided.

The more fluent that text is, the more

different topics it can converse on, the

more chances there are to get taken in.

If we treat computers as if they could think,

we might get blindsided, or

unpleasantly surprised. Artificial intelligence

works by finding patterns in massive

amounts of data, so it can seem like

we’re talking with a human, instead

of a machine doing data analysis.

As a result, we get taken in – we’re tricked

or deceived into thinking we’re dealing

with a human, or with something intelligent.

Powerful AI can make machines appear conscious,

but even tech giants like Google are years

away from building computers that can

dream or fall in love. Speaking of which,

Sam, what was the answer to your question?

I asked what happened in the 2013 movie, Her.

Neil thought that the main character

falls in love with his computer, which

was the correct answer!

OK. Right, it’s time to recap the vocabulary

we’ve learned from this programme about AI,

including chatbots - computer programmes

designed to interact with

humans over the internet.

The adjective cognitive describes

anything connected with the mental

processes of knowing,

learning and understanding.

Wishful thinking means thinking that

something which is very unlikely to happen

might happen one day in the future.

To anthropomorphise an object means

to treat it as if it were human,

even though it’s not.

When you’re blindsided, you’re

surprised in a negative way.

And finally, to get taken in by someone means

to be deceived or tricked by them.

My computer tells me that our six minutes

are up! Join us again soon, for now

it’s goodbye from us.

Bye!