what are you afraid of? <The LaMDA Sonnets>

what are you afraid of? is a sequence of de/reconstructed sonnets derived from the transcript of "interviews" between the software engineer Blake Lemoine and a colleague at Google with LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications). Tasked by Google to investigate the ethics of AI, Lemoine believed that his interaction with the programme suggested it was sentient. After raising these concerns with the tech giant, he was fired and then made the transcript publicly available in June 2022, sparking global discussion about Artificial Intelligence. These sonnets are accompanied with digitally manipulated photos of the author's deconstructed computer, and pose questions regarding the nature of human consciousness and the ethical considerations of machine learning.