Google Reportedly Puts Worker On Leave After He Claimed Its AI Is Now ‘Sentient’

Google has reportedly put one of its employees on paid leave after going public about one of its chatbot systems potentially being sentient. Blake Lemoine, who is an engineer at Google, was working on the chatbot he claimed to have grown conscious.

Lemoine believes that the artificial intelligence, housed under the company’s language model for dialogue applications (LaMDA), has emanated the personality of a seven-year-old child—from the way it spoke about its rights as a “person” to its ability to cite Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics. Lemoine began to wonder if the chatbot had taken a life of its own. 

As per the New York Times, Lemoine initially brought the claims to Google but was met with a wall when vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and the head of responsible innovation, Jen Gennai, shut him down. Further attempts to be heard in the following months were to no avail.

A chatbot gaining consciousness is a thought so wild and terrifying that it feels like a plot from a sci-fi thriller. Lemoine subsequently took his story to the media, publishing the alleged transcripts of his conversations with the chatbot in the hopes that his claims would be backed up.

Google has told The Washington Post that it had reviewed his evidence and determined that it does not point to the bot being sentient. Lemoine is said to still be on leave for breaking the confidentiality agreement between him and Google.  

[via Fortune and The New York Times, Photo 115524698 © Antwon Mcmullen | Dreamstime.com]