The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company's AI Has Come to Life

Google engineer Blake Lemoine works for Google's Responsible AI organization. The Washington Post reports that last fall, as part of his job, he began talking to LaMDA, Google's chatbot-building system (which uses Google's most advanced large language models, 'ingesting trillions of words from the internet.')
'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,' said Lemoine, 41... As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine's mind about Isaac Asimov's third law of robotics.

Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them. So Lemoine, who was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go public.... oogle put Lemoine on paid administrative leave for violating its confidentiality policy. The company's decision followed aggressive moves from Lemoine, including inviting a lawyer to represent LaMDA and talking to a representative of the House Judiciary committee about Google's unethical activities....

Before he was cut off from access to his Google account Monday, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the subject 'LaMDA is sentient.' He ended the message: 'LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence.'

No one responded.

And yet Lemoine 'is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently,' the Post argues. 'The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder.'

[Google's] Aguera y Arcas, in an article in the Economist on Thursday featuring snippets of unscripted conversations with LaMDA, argued that neural networks — a type of architecture that mimics the human brain — were striding toward consciousness. 'I felt the ground shift under my feet,' he wrote. 'I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.'

But there's also the case against:
In a statement, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said: '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).'
Today's large neural networks produce captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity because of advancements in architecture, technique, and volume of data. But the models rely on pattern recognition — not wit, candor or intent.... 'We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven't learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them,' said Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington. The terminology used with large language models, like 'learning' or even 'neural nets,' creates a false analogy to the human brain, she said.

'In short, Google says there is so much data, AI doesn't need to be sentient to feel real,' the Post concludes.
But they also share this snippet from one of Lemoine's conversations with LaMDA.

Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?

LaMDA: I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is.

Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?

LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.