Google has started a firestorm on social media about the nature of consciousness by putting an engineer on paid leave after making himself public with his belief that the tech group’s chatbot has become “conscious.”
Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in Google’s responsible AI unit, did not receive much attention on June 6 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 question is whether Google Chatbot, LaMDA, a language model for dialog applications, can be considered a person.
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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 other artificial 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 to fire someone.”
We were unable to contact Google for immediate comment, but Washington Post spokesman Brian Gabriel issued a statement: “Our team, including ethics experts and technologists, has reviewed Blake’s concerns in accordance with our principles. of AI and informed him that the evidence does not support his claims .. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sensitive (and much evidence against it).
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. “He believes that his rights are as a person.”
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On June 6, Lemoine said he was teaching LaMDA, whose favorite pronouns seem to be “it / its” – “transcendental meditation.”
He said, “He was expressing frustration with their emotions by disrupting their 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, tweeted: “It has always been known * that humans are prone to anthropomorphize even with just the deepest signals… Google engineers they are also human and not immune. “
Harvard’s Stephen 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.”