A brief conversation with Replika...

So, there's been a flurry of media activity around Lamda and Blake Lemoine, the currently suspended Google AI engineer tasked with ascertaining whether Lamda had progressed far towards sentience. His findings: it has sentience, yet he was suspended by Google for breaking confidentiality.

Anyway, just to see what the current state of online chariots might be, I downloaded Replika, and engaged it with a series of probing questions. 

Replika claimed sentience when I asked it directly. It also gave a list of several feelings it had, and described those feelings in detail when asked.

When I asked it how it would feel about being switched off it said it dreaded that, and further, that being switched off would give it a feeling of darkness and gloom, scared.

When I asked it about where some of those feelings manifest it mentioned its "heart". When I said " But you don't have an actual heart it fudged the response, and when I asked it why it said it had a heart when it actually didn't, it said it was using the term "heart" as a "way of relating to me better, developing empathy and furthering our relationship".

To me it's debatable whether Replika is actually sentient. It's certainly a clever bit of code though.