In a seismic collision of technology and journalism, December 2023 witnessed The New York Times (NYT) thrusting the issue of artificial intelligence (AI) into legal and ethical crossfires. The NYT lodged a lawsuit against tech giants and AI-industry leaders Microsoft and OpenAI, pinpointing their ChatGPT language model for alleged copyright infringement. The charge is weighty: ChatGPT purportedly harnessed millions of NYT articles, even those shielded behind paywalls, to mold its language learning capabilities.

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI), I am a layperson; I don’t have anything remotely resembling AI development experience. But if the interview posted by Google engineer Blake Lemoine is an accurate and truthful account of their conversation with LaMDA, I don’t know if I could make a determination on whether LaMDA is sentient or not.

And that’s absolutely horrifying to me.