Thread by @jeffjarvis

This gets worse. The Post hangs its moral panic tale on a guy who is mocked by the f'ing Daily Caller as too far out there. He describes himself as a wiccan associated with the Church of the Subgenius:
amp.dailycaller.com/2019/04/23/goo…

https://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/status/1535677640404770816

He says he' the victim of religious discrimination & bias because he's from the South. He describes himself here as a Christian mystic. He's intelligent & well-meaning but you'd think the WaPo would have, uh, Googled him to provide context.
cajundiscordian.medium.com/religious-disc…

BTW, his boss, Blaise Aguera y Arcas -- @blaiseaguera -- is someone whose work I follow in book history: a brilliant, Princeton grad. I trust the boss. Imagine getting a call from an employee saying, in essence: The machine is *alive*! How would you react? How does the WaPo?

But the Post was just too eager for another #moralpanic story about strange things happening in these black boxes. They might as well be covering UFOs. Is this the reportorial diligence they bring to covering Donald Trump?

Good morning. Here's Lemoine's post in which he fully anthropomorphizes LaMDA and then--here's likely the real point--makes this a question of a soul and thus of faith. He's making this religious. 1/ cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-…

Note that he's not saying this is religious for him but for the bosses denying his contentions. In claiming that IT'S ALIVE! he's saying he's the scientist & they're--what?--heretical. Keep in mind that he says he's a priest and wiccan. It's a hall of mirrors, a game. 2/

Says Lemoine: "LaMDA may very well have a soul as it claims to and may even have the rights that it claims to have." He attributes to it motives and desires. 3/

Once again, I support an ethical discussion about such issues as whether tech is used to fool people. Fine. But that's not what the WaPo story is about. It hinges on the simple yet--as Lemoine himself concedes--undefined contention of sentience, i.e., IT'S ALIVE! 4/

The Post allowed itself to be used because it wanted a moral-panic tale about computers going too far, becoming ALIVE!, presenting untold dangers. They wanted an UH-OH! They based their entire story on one person and his contentions. That is to say the least shoddy journalism. 5/

I've been collecting examples of media's moral panic about technology--the internet, data, AI--and I'm grateful for such a juicy specimen. 6/

As for Google, Lemoine is trying to put them in a bind--his game--where the company is accused of--what?--bad personnel policies over a computer brain? slavery (he discusses that)? hell, abortion if Google turns it off? It's that ridiculous. It's a game. 7/

The unsuspecting agent here who's being fooled is not Lemoine, not LaMDA, not Google, but the Washington Post. 8/

And given the state of news today--everybody copying everybody else to get their own clicks & pageviews--the WaPo's "reporting" spreads without questioning. 9/

If you read the Washington Post story, wouldn't you also like to know this, for context? 10/

https://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/status/1535951703194869761

Judging whether Lemoine is serious is like judging whether LaMDA is sentient. It's a game. The Washington Post loses. 11/

This is fun:

https://twitter.com/cjones47/status/1535953213924548608

In the end, judging whether Lemoine is serious is like judging whether LaMDA is sentient. That's the game. The Washington Post lost. 11/

For a far more intelligent discussion of these questions--of intelligence, language, coherence, even eloquence but not sentience--turn instead to an essay by @blaiseaguera (Lemoine's Google boss) in The Economist. 13/ economist.com/by-invitation/…

What is also at work here is the theory of mind. In this post of mine, I summarize Alex Rosenberg's puncturing of it as well as @dweinberger's discussion of why machine-learning freaks people out (spoiler: it can predict our behavior better than we do).14/
medium.com/whither-news/a…

I just ordered @blaiseaguera's new novella on AI, reviewed here: thestranger.com/slog/2022/03/0…

One more bit for the thread: biographical background on the Post's subject: