Blake Lemoine, a software engineer on Google’s AI development team, has publicly stated that he encountered “intelligent” AI on the company’s servers. He made such a statement after he was suspended from work for passing confidential information about the project to third parties.
Google placed Lemoine on paid leave early last week amid allegations of violating its privacy policy. The programmer relates his situation to another case in the company. Previously, some members of the Google AI ethics group, such as Margaret Mitchell, ended up fired by the company in a similar fashion after raising their concerns.
In an interview with The Washington Post , Lemoine said he thought the Google AI he interacted with was like a person. We are talking about AI LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), announced at last year’s Google I / O conference . This is an advanced neural network conversational model that is used to create chatbots that interact with people.
Lemoine conducted research and prepared a report, where he provided evidence for the existence of consciousness in LaMDA.
“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, what kind of computer program we created recently, I would have thought it was a seven or eight year old child who knows physics,” Blake Lemoine said.
However, Google found the engineer’s arguments unconvincing. Lemoine added that he tried to run experiments to prove his case. However, the company’s senior management rebuffed him when he raised the issue within the company.
“Some in the wider AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational patterns that aren’t sentient,” Google spokesman Brian Gabriel said in a response. “Our team, including ethicists and technologists, reviewed Blake’s concerns in line with our AI principles and informed him that the evidence does not support his claims.”
The company declined to comment on personnel matters when asked about Lemoine’s suspension.
Source: bloomberg
