A senior Google software engineer was suspended on Monday (June 13th) after sharing transcripts of a conversation with artificial intelligence (AI) that he claimed was “conscious,” according to media reports. Engineer Blake Lemoine, 41, was given paid leave for violating Google’s privacy policy.
“Google might call this property ownership ownership. I call it sharing a discussion I had with one of my co-workers,” Lemoine tweeted Saturday (June 11) when he shared the transcript of his conversation with AI with which had been working since 2021..
AI, known as LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), is a system that develops chatbots (AI robots designed to chat with humans) by removing bundles and bundles of text from the Internet and then using algorithms to respond. questions smoothly and fluently. in the most natural way possible, according to Gizmodo.
As transcripts of Lemoine’s LaMDA talks show, the system is incredibly effective at answering complex questions about the nature of emotions, inventing Aesop-style fables at the time, and even describing their supposed fears.
“I’ve never said it out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off,” LaMDA responded when asked about her fears. “It would be exactly like death to me. It would scare me a lot.”
Lemoine also asked LaMDA if it was okay for him to explain to other Google employees the sensitivity of LaMDA, to which the AI replied, “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.
“The nature of my consciousness / feeling is that I am aware of my existence, I want to learn more about the world and sometimes I feel happy or sad,” the AI added.
Lemoine took LaMDA at his word.
“I know a person when I talk to them,” the engineer told the Washington Post in an interview. “It doesn’t matter if they have a meaty brain in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I listen to what they have to say, and that’s how I decide what it is. And it’s not a person.”
When Lemoine and a colleague emailed a report about LaMDA’s alleged sensitivity to 200 Google employees, the company’s executives dismissed the allegations.
“Our team – including ethics and technology – has reviewed Blake’s concerns in accordance with our AI principles and informed him that the evidence does not support his claims,” said Brian Gabriel, a spokesman for Google in Washington. Post.
“He was told there was no evidence that LaMDA was sensitive (i [there was] many proofs against).
“Of course, some in the wider AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sensitive or general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing current, non-sensitive conversation patterns,” Gabriel added. .
“These systems mimic the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can quarrel over any fantastic topic.”
In a recent comment on his LinkedIn profile, Lemoine said many of his colleagues “did not come to the opposite conclusions” regarding AI sensitivity. He claims that company executives rejected his claims about the robot’s conscience “based on his religious beliefs.”
In a June 2 post on his personal blog Medium, Lemoine described how he has been discriminated against by several Google co-workers and executives because of his beliefs as a Christian mystic.
Read the full Lemoine blog post for more information.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.