A flurry of activity occurred on social media after Blake Lemoine a Google developer, was placed on leave for claiming that LaMDA, a chatbot, had become sentient—in other words, had acquired the ability to experience feelings. In support of his claim, Lemoine posted excerpts from an exchange with LaMDA, which responded to queries by saying, “aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.” It also stated that it has the same “wants and needs as people.”
Rather than focus on the speculative rights of sentient AI, we need to address human rights
