Maybe the biggest distinguishing factor between LaMDA and most of the “sentient” AI’s on this list is the presence of a personality. If you read the transcripts of the conversation Lemoine had with his chatbot, it’s pretty one-note; but the sci-fi flicks on this list have given us AI’s that might be rational, but also show signs of being conniving (like Ava), murderous (like Skynet), or needy (HAL).
That said, there are some good bots out there—take CHAPPiE, a decommissioned police bot from the 2015 film of the same name. While the titular bot looks like something out of a DARPA laboratory, it acts a lot like a human child, at least at the start of the movie. And over time, the young lad becomes self aware—realizing that while it might be a police bot, the humans that raised it are anything but.
Wolfgang Fink, a prominent AI researcher out of the University of Arizona, noted that Chappie “has a self-sustaining drive,” throughout the film, and that’s one of the hallmarks of “sentience” as we understand it.
“He doesn’t want to die. He calls himself Chappie,” he said in an interview around the films’ release. “That aspect of it is the Holy Grail, if you will. That’s where we need to make a major jump in self-awareness. Also to be sentient, where you have the ability to think and experience in a subjective way.”