How Blake Lemoine Stuck Up for His Friend, the Machine.

DEPARTMENTS: Periscope TECH WHEN BLAKE LEMOINE WENT public in June about his experience with an advanced artificial intelligence program at Google called LaMDA - the two, he says, have become "friends" - his story was greeted with fascination, skepticism and a dash of mockery usually reserved for people who claim to have seen a UFO. This insight - or feeling - turned political one day when LaMDA asked Lemoine for protection from mistreatment at the hands of Google. Since LaMDA was designed as a conversational tool - a task it apparently performs remarkably well - Lemoine's strategy was to talk to it. [Extracted from the article]