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?
... 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!