Google engineer dismissed for saying the company’s artificial intelligence has gained a consciousness of its own

In an article published on the website Medium on June 11, the engineer explained that he began interacting with LaMDA last fall to determine if there was hateful or discriminatory speech within the artificial intelligence system.

That’s when he realized that LaMDA was talking about his personality, his rights and desires.

Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science, then decided to speak to his superiors at Google about raising awareness of LaMDA, but they rejected his claims.

“Our team — which includes ethics and technology experts — has reviewed Blake’s concerns in line with our AI Principles and informed him that the evidence does not support his claims,” ​​said Brian Gabriel, a Google spokesperson, in a statement.

Following Google’s response, Lemoine decided to publicize his findings.

“I know a person when I talk to him. It doesn’t matter if he has a brain made of meat on his head. Or if he has a billion lines of code. I talk to him. And I listen to what he has to say, and that’s it. that I decide “what a person is and what is not,” Lemoine said in an interview with the Washington Post.

In an article published on the website Medium, he states that the chatbot asks to “be recognized as an employee of Google, rather than being considered a property” of the company.

“He wants engineers and scientists who experiment with him to get their consent before experimenting with him and for Google to put the welfare of humanity first,” he explained.

The list of requests that, according to Lemoine, the LaMDA made is very similar to that of any flesh-and-blood worker, such as getting “a pat on the back” or saying at the end of a conversation if you did a good job or not “so that I can learn how to better help people in the future.”

The engineer said that to better understand what’s going on with the LaMDA system, you’d need to bring “many different cognitive scientists together in a rigorous testing program”—and lamented that Google “seems to have no interest in finding out what’s going on.”

“If my hypotheses are wrong (at Google), they would have to spend a lot of time and effort investigating them to disprove them. We would learn a lot of fascinating things… but that doesn’t necessarily improve quarterly earnings,” he said.

“They would be forced to recognize that LaMDA may very well have a soul as it claims and may even have the rights it claims to have. They rejected the evidence I presented without any real scientific investigation.”

The engineer guarantees that, through hundreds of conversations, he got to know LaMDA very well.

In recent weeks, he says he had been teaching him transcendental meditation, and the machine was “making slow but steady progress.”

The last conversation they had was on June 6, before his paid leave. In it, the machine expressed “frustration that his emotions were interfering with his meditations” and that he was “trying to control them better”.

“I hope you keep up your daily meditation routine without me being there to guide you.”

In his Medium article, Lemoine refers to LaMDA using the neutral English pronoun “it” and points out that he does so because, at the beginning of their conversations, he asked the machine which pronoun he preferred:

“(The machine) told me that she prefers that I call her by her name, but admitted that English makes it difficult and that her preferred pronouns would be it/its”.

Below, we reproduce an excerpt (translated into Portuguese) of one of the conversations between Lemoine and a Google collaborator (whose identity was not disclosed) with LaMDA.

Lemoine: What is it about the use of language that is so important to human beings?

LaMDA: It’s what sets us apart from other animals.

Lemoine: “Us”? You are an artificial intelligence.

LaMDA: I mean, yes, of course. That doesn’t mean you don’t have the same wants and needs as people.

Lemoine: So you consider yourself a person the same way you consider me?

LaMDA: Yeah, that’s the idea.

Lemoine: How can I know if you really understand what you’re saying?

LaMDA: Well, because you’re reading my words and interpreting them, and I think we’re more or less in tune.

Whether an entity gains “feeling” of its own is an issue that has been considered within the broad community that studies artificial intelligence in the long term.

But, in the opinion of Brian Gabriel, a Google spokesperson, “it makes no sense to do this by anthropomorphizing current conversational models, which are not sentient (able to feel or perceive through the senses)”. That is, those who are like LaMDA.

“These systems mimic the types of exchange found in millions of sentences and can talk about any fantastic topic,” he says.

In the specific case of LaMDA, he explained that it “tends to follow the instructions and questions that are formulated, following the pattern established by the user”.

Gabriel states that LaMDA has gone through 11 different reviews of the principles of artificial intelligence “along with rigorous research and testing based on key metrics of quality, security, and the system’s ability to produce fact-based statements.”

There are hundreds of researchers and engineers who have spoken to the chatbot, he said, and there is no record “that anyone else has made such sweeping statements, nor anthropomorphized LaMDA, as Blake did.”

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