Rabat – Google engineer Blake Lemoine has been suspended by the tech giant after he claimed one of its AIs became sentient.
LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is an AI that Google uses to build its chatbots. The program learns human dialogue and language through ingesting trillions of samples from around the internet.
Lemoine started talking to the AI in the fall, as part of his job to test if it uses hate speech or discriminatory language.
Not only did the AI talk about its own rights and personhood, according to Lemoine, it also managed to change his mind regarding Asimov’s third law of robotics.
The third law posits that a robot or artificial intelligence has to protect its own existence, unless it means injuring a human being or disobeying their orders.
The exchange happened during a conversation Lemoine was having about religion.
“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” Lemoine told the Washington Post in an interview.
Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas dismissed the claims, which made Lemoine, who was also placed on paid leave on Monday, go public with his story.
“Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it),” a Google spokesperson said.
Skeptics say that the conversation was a natural result of the AI’s neural networks – which relies on pattern recognition to form speech similar to a human’s, but does not rely on any wit or active intent.
This would mean that while LaMDA and other bots might repeat things that are already prolific on other corners of the internet, they do not actually understand the meaning behind them or have any sentience.
