From “Sentience and Sensibility,” which was published in the September/October issue of The Baffler.

It was all too easy to dismiss the Washington Post story about Blake Lemoine—the Google engineer who claimed this summer that his employer’s chatbot, LaMDA, was sentient—as an instance of clickbait, hype, and moral panic. Its many absurdities appeared contrived to exhaust the attention of a populace hollowed out by years of doomscrolling and news fatigue. As far as the machine learning community was concerned, the story was a distraction. There were, as these experts knew, legitimate issues with language models, and those issues had…