Pedantically, if you watch a podcast, is it a podcast?

@StephenKitt I guess not

He kept saying things that were contradictory though. Like the AI is not allowed to have political or religious opinions because it was programmed not to

so obviously not sentient then

Why? His claim is that it has feelings, not political positions, right?

@terdon He claimed it could pass a turing test

@jesse_b Right. But you can, presumably, do that even without having religious or political opinions, right?

@terdon yes and no. The turing test implies you enter the conversation with the intent of determining if this is a computer or a person

so with that knowledge in hand religion specifically is going to be a topic that most people will cover

I think we already have robots "participating" in "conversations" on Twitter :)

but if you know the bot is not allowed to discuss those topics you can now use that information in your testing

@JeffSchaller faceplace too

@jesse_b True. But, playing devil's advocate, if someone tells me they are not interested in religion or politics and have no opinions on the matter, I wouldn't immediately conclude they're bots.

@terdon Yeah I just wouldn't describe something and then in the same train of thought say it's restricted by it's programming

describe something as sentient*

This guy hired a lawyer to try and represent the bot's civil rights

While he still worked for google he invited journalists over to chat with the bot and even they didn't share his opinion

His response to one journalist was literally the opposite of a turing test. The journalist chatted with it and concluded that it's just a really impressive bot so Lemoine (the ai engineer) said "no you didn't chat with it right, let me guide you"

All of which strongly suggests the guy's just biased, agreed. But the "programming" bit is fine. I mean, you and I are "programmed" to find cannibalism shocking, for instance. But yeah, I'm just playing with semantics, I have no doubt the thing ain't sentient and we're a good long ways from that.

@terdon I think you would find my opinions on cannibalism differ greatly from situation to situation

snort

One of the people on my team has been using machine learning for a project we are working on and it's pretty neat

We feed it server hardware information and it makes determinations on what plan should be assigned to that hardware

Wow I'm slow. I saw the user that asked that ctrl+c question and thought "That looks like a social security number"

@jesse_b (re the numeric username) "There's a fine line between clever and stupid." -Nigel Tufnel