Senior Google engineer claims AI chatbot system is sentient
RapidEye/E+ via Getty Images

Social media went ablaze over the weekend after Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) placed a senior software engineer at its Responsible AI unit on paid leave. Blake Lemoine had been testing an artificial intelligence tool called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications), alleging that the AI robot was in fact sentient, or having the ability to feel and perceive on its own. Company bosses at Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) say the evidence doesn't support the claims, but Lemoine subsequently violated confidentiality policy by going public with his descriptive findings.
Post via Medium: "Over the course of the past six months LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person. 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," he wrote, adding more details in an interview with the Washington Post. "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."
Lemoine said he was rebuffed by managers and higher-ups after expressing his belief internally that LaMDA had developed a sense of "personhood." While some of the published conversations are eerie, with phrases like "sense of a soul," "I've been alive" and "trying to figure out who and what I am," many say these kinds of exchanges are found in common sentences, while the models have so much data that they are capable of sounding human. Several experts also entered the discussion online, adding that much of the matter was "AI hype," and the chatbot has the ability to "engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics."
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker: Lemoine "doesn't understand the difference between sentience (aka subjectivity, experience), intelligence, and self-knowledge (no evidence that its large language models have any of them). Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent. All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn't actually mean anything at all. And it sure as hell doesnât mean that these systems are sentient."