The technology press has found its latest punching bag, and this time it is a Googler that claimed the LaMDA chatbot had become sentient. Faultline has been waiting for someone in our world of media and entertainment to put their foot in it, but none have been so brave or foolish as of writing. Still, the topic brings a lot to the fore, considering some of the claims vendors make. The Language Model for Dialog Applications (LaMDA) is widely regarded as a very advanced chatbot – one that can run with nearly anything thrown at it. The Google engineer at the heart of the matter is Blake Lemoine, and reading through Lemoine’s ‘interview’ with LaMDA, in which the topic of…