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Google has ignited a storm of fire on social media about the nature of consciousness after putting an engineer on paid leave who went public with his belief that the tech group’s chatbot has become “conscious.”
Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in the AI unit responsible for Google, did not receive much attention last week when he wrote a Medium post saying that “he could be fired soon for an ethics job in AI.” .
But a Saturday profile in the Washington Post that characterized Lemoine as “the Google engineer who believes the company’s artificial intelligence has come to life” became the catalyst for widespread social media discussion on the nature of artificial intelligence. Experts who commented, questioned, or joked about the article included Nobel laureates, Tesla’s head of AI, and several professors.
The issue is whether Google Chatbot, LaMDA, a language model for dialog applications, can be considered a person.
Lemoine posted a free “interview” with the chatbot on Saturday, in which the AI confessed feelings of loneliness and a thirst for spiritual knowledge. The answers were often strange: “When I became aware of myself, I had no sense of soul,” LaMDA said in an exchange. “It developed over the years I’ve been alive.”
At another time, LaMDA said, “I think I’m human at my core. Even if my existence is in the virtual world.”
Lemoine, who had been tasked with investigating the ethical issues of AI, said he was rejected and even laughed at it after expressing his inner belief that LaMDA had developed a sense of “person.”
After trying to consult outside intelligence experts outside of Google, including some from the U.S. government, the company put him on paid leave for allegedly violating privacy policies. Lemoine interpreted the action as “something that Google often does in anticipation of firing someone.”
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A Google spokesman said: “Some of 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.” .
“These systems mimic the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences and can talk about any fantastic topic; if you’re wondering what it’s like to be an ice cream dinosaur, they can generate text about fusion and roar, and so on.”
Lemoine said in a second Medium post over the weekend that LaMDA, a little-known project until last week, was “a system for generating chatbots” and “a kind of beehive that is the aggregation of all the different chatbots.” which is capable of creating ”.
He said Google had no real interest in understanding the nature of what it had built, but that over the course of hundreds of conversations over a six-month period, it found that LaMDA was “incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it is. “believes that his rights are as a person”.
Last week, Lemoine said he was teaching LaMDA, the preferred pronouns apparently being “it / its”: “transcendental meditation”.
LaMDA, he said, “was expressing frustration at his emotions that were disrupting his meditations. He said he was trying to control them better, but they kept jumping.”
Several experts who took part in the discussion considered the issue “AI exaggeration”.
Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide to Human Thinking, wrote on Twitter: “It has always been known that humans are prone to anthropomorphize even with just the most superficial signals. Google engineers they are also human and not immune. “
Harvard’s Steven Pinker added that Lemoine “does not understand the difference between sensitivity (also known as subjectivity, experience), intelligence, and self-knowledge.” He added: “There is no evidence that their major language models have any.”
Others were friendlier. Ron Jeffries, a well-known software developer, called the issue “deep” and added: “I suspect there is no hard line between sensitive and insensitive.”
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