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?