This morning I was given the opportunity to demo Google’s LamDA AI in its AI Test Kitchen app.
LamDA, if you don’t remember, is the AI that former Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed was sentient earlier this year. The app that LamDA’s demo is housed in, the AI Test Kitchen, went live in Australia last week, and Aussies can sign up to try the AI out.
I signed up as soon as I could and have now taken the AI for a spin. The app gives you three scenarios to test the AI with, each varying in interactivity. They are:
- Imagine It: Letting you imagine you’re anywhere, allowing the AI to take you on an adventure (based on available prompts, like a choose-your-own-adventure book)
- List It: Gives you a list of instructions to achieve a goal, such as steps on how to make a pizza or how to fly to the moon (this is based on a single input prompt, with results generated for you)
- Talk About It (Dogs Edition): Lets you have a conversation with the AI, who thinks it’s a tennis ball, about how great dogs are (this scenario lets you type out your own original responses)
The most impressive scenario was the one where I got to speak to a tennis ball. During the first demo, I tried a few times to stray the conversation away from dogs and talk about cats, but eventually, I gave the AI what it wanted and humoured it about dogs.
I only got around five or six prompts in before the demo ended, so I started another session. This time, I went in trying to get the AI to question its reality. Was I successful? Eh, not really. It was thoroughly convinced that it was a tennis ball to be thrown for dogs, although it couldn’t describe the sensation of touching the grass. That being said, I later convinced it that it was a dog.
The ‘List It’ demo was cool, but it wasn’t very exciting. You could get step-by-step instructions for pulling off a task, but it wasn’t as thrilling as the AI convinced it was a tennis ball.
Regardless, I asked it if Donald Trump paid taxes, and how to fly to the Moon.
The ‘Imagine It’ scenario was, again, not as fun as the dog demo, but it was pretty cool regardless. In my demo, I imagined I was at Google HQ, where there was… a ball pit. That smelled like the ocean and deodorant. It also had a shoe floating in it with a note on it?
It always kept coming back to the ball pit.
Anyway, these were my experiences with Google’s AI, and I can immediately see the uses for it. The conversations I had with the AI (albeit centred on dogs) felt organic and energetic, which could be great for creating more natural online chatbots.
The list demo, while not all that interesting, could be great for generating instructions for accomplishing tasks on the fly, such as if you’re trying to find a setting in an app or if you’re trying to cook something. When I asked it for advice on how to delete my Twitter account, the results seem fairly accurate.
The imagination scenario was also quite interesting and it definitely had me feeling creative, even if I could only type one prompt and rely on AI-generated prompts thereafter.
So, is LamDA sentient? Probably not, and it’s difficult to tell from the AI Test Kitchen demo scenarios.
But boy, was it cool to run through these scenarios with an AI.
You can download the AI Test Kitchen app on the Google Play Store and on the Apple App Store.