Google suspended an engineer after he claimed that an artificial intelligence chatbot that the company developed had become “sentient”. Blake Lemoine, a software engineer at Alphabet’s Google, also claimed that the AI chatbot thinks and responds like a human being.

The tech giant suspended Lemoine and put him on paid leave soon after his claims that Google’s AI chatbot behaves like a person. As per the tech giant, Lemoine violated the company’s confidentiality policy. The company also dismissed his claims. [1]

Figure 1. AI Bot had become sentient in google

Figure 1 shows the Alphabet Inc. unit placed the researcher on paid leave early last week on claims he breached the firm's confidentiality policy, he said in a Medium post titled "May be fired soon for doing AI ethics work." In the posting, he draws a connection to prior members of Google's AI ethics group, such as Margaret Mitchell, who were eventually dismissed by the company in a similar fashion after raising concerns. [2]

The Washington Post on Saturday ran an interview with Lemoine, wherein he said he concluded the Google AI he interacted with was a person, “in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist.” The AI in question is dubbed LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, and is used to generate chat bots that interact with human users by adopting various personality tropes. Lemoine said he tried to conduct experiments to prove it, but was rebuffed by senior executives at the company when he raised the matter internally. [3]

"LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person," Lemoine wrote on Medium. "The thing which continues to puzzle me is how strong Google is resisting giving it what it wants, since what it’s asking for is so simple and would cost them nothing."

A Google spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that Lemoine’s claims were taken seriously and analyzed by ethicists and technologists, but that no evidence was found to support his assertions. [4]

References:

1. https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/google-engineer-sent-on-leave-after-claiming-ai-chatbot-has-become-sentient-1961773-2022-06-13
2. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/google-suspends-engineer-who-claimed-ai-bot-had-become-sentient-3062051
3. https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/corporate-news/google-suspends-engineer-who-claimed-ai-bot-had-become-sentient/92177664
4. https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/google-suspends-engineer-claims-ai-sentient

Cite this article:

Thanusri swetha J (2022), AI Bot had become sentient in google, Anatechmaz, pp.82