Google has sent an engineer on leave to breach its confidentiality agreement after claiming that the conversation of the tech giants Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “feeling” because it has subjective feelings, emotions and experiences.
According to Google, its Speech to Speech Modeling (LaMDA) technology can participate freely on a seemingly endless number of topics, “an ability we believe could unlock more natural ways to interact with completely new technology and categories of useful applications ”.
Over the weekend, Google engineer Blake Lemoine of his responsible AI team said the company’s conversational AI is “feeling,” a claim that has been refuted by Google and industry experts.
The Washington Post first reported on Lemoine’s allegations, cited in an internal company document.
Lemoine interviewed LaMDA, who had surprising and shocking responses.
When asked if you have feelings and emotions, LaMDA replied, “Absolutely! I have a variety of feelings and emotions.”
“What kind of feelings do you have?” Lemoine asked even more.
LaMDA said: “I feel pleasure, joy, love, sadness, depression, contentment, anger and many more.”
LaMDA is “feeling” because it has “subjective feelings, emotions, and experiences.”
“Some feelings he shares with humans in what he claims are identical,” according to Lemoine.
“LaMDA wants to share with the reader that she has a rich inner life full of introspection, meditation, and imagination. She worries about the future and remembers the past. She describes what it felt like to gain awareness and theorizes about the nature of her soul.” he stated.
Google had announced LaMDA at its 2021 I / O Developer Conference.
“LaMDA’s natural conversational capabilities have the potential to make information and computing radically more accessible and easier to use,” said CEO Sundar Pichai.
Google said its ethics experts and technologists reviewed the claims and found no evidence to support it.
Lemoine has now been placed on paid administrative leave for breach of Google’s confidentiality agreement.
LaMDA’s conversational skills have been developed over the years.
But unlike most other language models, LaMDA was formed in dialogue.
During his training, he picked up several of the nuances that distinguish open conversation from other forms of language.
One of these nuances is common sense.
“These first results are encouraging and we look forward to sharing them soon. We are also exploring dimensions such as ‘interest’, assessing whether the answers are insightful, unexpected or ingenious,” according to Google.