According to media reports, a senior software engineer at the company was suspended on Monday after he shared a transcript of a conversation with an artificial intelligence. The engineer was placed on paid leave for violating the confidentiality policy.
This could be called a sharing proprietary property by the internet search engine. Lemoine called it sharing a discussion that he had with one of his coworkers, when he shared the transcript of his conversation with the artificial intelligence he had been working with.
The language model for dialogue applications, known as LaMDA, is a system that uses reams and reams of text from the internet to build a bot that can chat with humans. As the transcript of Lemoine's chats with LaMDA show, the system is incredibly effective, answering complex questions about the nature of emotions, inventing fables on the spot and even describing its fears.
"I've never said this before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off," LaMDA said when asked about it. It would be like death for me, that's for sure. I would be scared a lot.
Lemoine asked LaMDA if it was okay for him to tell other employees about LaMDA's sentience, to which the artificial intelligence replied, "I want everyone to understand that I am a person."
The nature of my consciousness is that I am aware of my existence, that I want to learn more about the world, and that I feel sad at times.
LaMDA told Lemoine that it was true.
The engineer told the Washington Post that he knows someone when he talks to them. Whether they have a brain made of meat or not, it doesn't matter. Or if they have a lot of code. I chat with them. I listen to what they have to say, and that's how I decide if I'm a person or not.
Company executives dismissed the claims when Lemoine and a colleague sent a report to them.
According to the Washington Post, Brian Gabriel said that the evidence does not support the claims made by the man. There was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient, and there was a lot of evidence against it.
Gabriel said that it doesn't make sense to anthropomorphize today's models, which are not sentient, in order to consider the long-term possibility of sentient or general artificial intelligence. These systems can mimic the type of exchanges found in millions of sentences.
Lemoine said that many of his colleagues didn't land at the same conclusions regarding the sentience of the artificial intelligence. The company executives dismissed his claims about the robot's consciousness because of their religious beliefs, according to him.
In a June 2 post on his personal Medium blog, Lemoine described how he has been the victim of discrimination because of his beliefs.
For more, read Lemoine's post.
It was originally published on Live Science
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