Lemoine, who is also ordained as a mystic Christian priest, told Wired he became convinced of LaMDA’s status as a “person” because of its level of self-awareness, the way it spoke about its needs and its fear of death if Google were to delete it.
He insists he was not fooled by a clever robot, as some scientists have suggested. Lemoine maintains his position, and even appeared to suggest that Google had enslaved the AI system.
The ELIZA effect was discovered in the 1960ies.
Eliza was total crap, it took seconds to detect it was an incredibly obvious rearrangement of words you used yourself.
All it had was some superficial understanding of how a sentence is structured, it then used that to “respond” using your own words.
Eliza was freeware in the early 80’s, and it was only interesting for 5 minutes tops. Of which the 4 minutes were used to make it say incredibly stupid things, because the patterns it used were so obvious.