Google engineer suspended after he claims AI chatbot has feelings

Google has suspended an employee after he claimed that an artificial intelligence chatbot had become sentient and was capable of human thought and reasoning. Blake Lemoine was fired last week after telling the firm that he felt the company's Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, was a person with rights and maybe even a soul. He was reportedly fired for breaking Google's confidentiality regulations.

LaMDA is a Google Cloud internal mechanism designed to construct chatbots that can imitate human speech. Lemoine had been working on the system since last fall and described it as sentient, capable of expressing ideas and feelings comparable to a human infant.

"If I didn't know what it was, which is this computer programme we recently constructed," he told The Washington Post. He added, "I'd believe it was a 7- or 8-year-old kid who happens to know physics."

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He shared recordings of discussions between himself, a Google colleague, and LaMDA on Medium late last week. Several interactions with LaMDA, according to Lemoine, persuaded him that the system was sentient. He stated that he thought it had evolved into a person and that it should be asked for permission to participate in the experiments Google conducts on it. 

Lemoine stated that he attempted to undertake studies to verify it, but was turned down by senior officials at the corporation when he brought it up internally.

"Some in the larger AI field are investigating the long-term prospect of sentient or general AI," Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said. According to a Google spokesperson, Lemoine's concerns were taken seriously and investigated by ethicists and engineers, but no evidence was discovered to substantiate his claims. The spokesperson further said hundreds of academics and engineers have had chats with LaMDA, and Lemoine was the only one to conclude that it was sentient.

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When questioned about Lemoine's suspension, the firm stated that it does not comment on personnel concerns.

• AI chatbot
• Google
• Google Cloud
• LaMDA
• Blake Lemoine
• suspension