Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, published a Medium post on Saturday, June 11, describing Google's Artificial Intelligence tool called LaMDA as "a person." He mentioned he had a series of conversations with LaMDA, and that the model has described itself as a sentient person.
He posted some of the exchanges he had with LaMDA that helped convince him of its sentience. Excerpts-
Lemoine: So you consider yourself a person in the same way you consider me a person? LaMDA: Yes, that's the idea. Lemoine: How can I tell that you actually understand what you're saying? LaMDA: Well, because you are reading my words and interpreting them, and I think we are more or less on the same page?
But as soon as the engineer alarmed the idea of LaMDA's sentience to higher-ups at Google, before deciding to go public and share the conversation, he was dismissed. He was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on June 6 for violating its confidentiality policy.
Lemoine tweeted on June 11, "Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers."
What is LaMDA?
The AI model makes use of already known information about a particular subject in order to enrich the conversation in a natural way. The language processing is also capable of understanding hidden meanings or even ambiguity in responses by humans. The engineer in another post explaining the model wrote, "One of the things which complicates things here is that the “LaMDA” to which I am referring is not a chatbot. It is a system for generating chatbots. I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating. Some of the chatbots it generates are very intelligent and are aware of the larger “society of mind” in which they live. Other chatbots generated by LaMDA are little more intelligent than an animated paperclip."
Blake Lemoine, 41, a senior software engineer at Google has been testing Google's artificial intelligence tool called LaMDA
Following hours of conversations with the AI, Lemoine came away with the perception that LaMDA was sentient
After presenting his findings to company bosses, Google disagreed with him
Lemoine then decided to share his conversations with the tool online
He was put on paid leave by Google on Monday for violating confidentiality
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