> Any question of personhood should be evaluated on the basis that we evaluate ourselves and others: by action and behavior, and not on whether sentience can or cannot arise from this or that configuration of code.

But what is action and behavior? We have a single interface to LaMDA: given a partially completed document, predict the next word. By iterating this process, we can make it predict a sentence, or paragraph. Continuing in this way, we could have it write a hypothetical dialogue between an AI and a human, but that is hardly a "canonical" way of using LaMDA, and there is no reason to identify the AI character in the document with LaMDA itself.

All this to say, I am not sure what you mean when you say it "claims sentience". What does it mean for it to "claim" something? Presumably, e.g., advanced image processing networks are as internally complex as LaMDA. But the interface to an advanced image processing network is, you put in an image, it gives out a list of objects and bounding boxes it detected in the image. What would it mean for such a network to claim sentience? LaMDA is no different, in that our interface to LaMDA does not allow us to ask it to "claim" things to us, only to predict likely completions of documents.