This paper is based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's (late) teaching on language and meaning, and its aim is to show how we can avoid the anthropomorphization of artificial intelligence or interpreting the work (the question of giving meaning) of AI as similar to or the same as the work of a human being. The way of determining the meaning of certain linguistic units performed by an AI and a human differs because the languages they operate with have a different set of (...) rules or criteria that are indicators of what a certain linguistic entity means. The core of AI in terms of meaning is its logical base, according to which it operates/calculates/manipulates the given information. On the other hand, a human being finds his/her criteria in the language activity performed in the language communities. (shrink)

On June 11th, 2022, Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, went public with his concerns about the possible sentience of a natural language generation program, LaMDA, that he was testing. In this paper I will defend Blake Lemoine and argue that he was correct in raising the issue of the possible sentience of LaMDA. We will first briefly discuss the specifics of the case and then delve into the science behind LaMDA. Several tests of machine sentience will (...) be reviewed and it will be argued that LaMDA would likely perform well on many of them. Next, we will discuss the question of sentience, both from a scientific and philosophical perspective. Then we will examine the two major approaches in the scientific study of consciousness and ask what they have to say about sentience. We will also examine the relationship between sentience, intelligence, understanding and causality. Finally, using what we have learned we will argue that there is indeed validity to Lemoine’s claim that LaMDA is sentient. (shrink)