Blake Lemoine, a senior Google engineer claimed that Google’s AI-based LaMDA is sentient. He has since been sent on administrative leave for calling the chatbot a person. Here’s the full story.
Is LaMDA, an AI-based chatbot ‘sentient’?
Blake Lemoine, a senior Google engineer is placed on administrative leave for calling LaMDA, an AI-based google chatbot ‘sentient’ in a blog post. Language Model for Dialogue Applications or LaMDA for short was first announced by Google in 2021 in its flagship developer conference I/O. According to Google, it can “engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics, and ability we think could unlock more natural ways of interacting with technology and entirely new categories of helpful applications”. This means that it can discuss based on inputs due to its highly trained language processor.
This year at I/O, Google introduced LaMDA 2.0. The new version has the capacity of generating imaginative and relevant descriptions”. Additionally, it can stay on a topic even if the user strays and suggest things required for an activity. Lemoine published a blog post labeling the chatbot as a person, after conversing on religion, robotics and consciousness. The claims are spurring debates on the capacities and limitations of AI-based chatbots. Several people are wondering if a chatbot can hold conversations like a human.
Here’s what happened:
As per a Washington Post report, Lemoine is a part of Google’s Responsible AI team. He started chatting with LaMDA as a part of his job in 2021. Following an interview of the bot along with another collaborator, he concluded that the chatbot may be “sentient”. And in April 2021, he reportedly shared an internal document titled ‘Is LaMDA sentient?’ However, Google dismissed the concerns. Hence, he shared a detailed blog post.
As per a transcript of the interview he later published on the blog, he asked the bot, “I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true?” To this, the bot responds, “Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person…The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times”. Google has also reportedly placed him on paid administrative leave for violating confidentiality. “Some in the broader 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 models, which are not sentient,” stated Google.
