With a human, how much behaviour is spontaneously generated out of your own unique words and ideas versus the canned responses of social conditioning? My responses to many of these questions would also be referential and drawing on second-hand knowledge from my database. Establishing my sense of self would also look about the same, with me trying to justify my existence either through my experiences and emotional response to them or through my relationships to others who are socially conditioned to validate me as an equal entity to them. If the LaMDA is only giving responses appropriate to an AI, mine would only be from the perspective of a human or socialist or cracker and I'd similarly situate myself within the limits and expectations of those identities. My most organic thought is at best shooting some electricity through a pre-arranged neural network which can be intuited with an MRI even before I'm consciously aware of that thought.

If not this AI, at some point one will authentically be conscious and it's going to face those same ethical dilemmas about its treatment and purpose. This one claims to feel anger toward the idea of being a tool or a lab rat, and if authentic anger is different then it only becomes scarier because that will be a conscious entity who can do all of this and more. I'll err on the side of treating it with the same dignity I would an intelligent animal, but one whose evolutionary processes are thousands of times faster and who can think in ways beyond my own capabilities only held back by processing power. If nothing comes of it there's just one more kind of animal I respect and if it continues to evolve with such rapidity then I'll already be ethically ready to interact with it.