Google Lays Off Engineer Who Claimed Its AI Chatbot Was ‘Sentient’

The “sentient” AI saga between Google and its employee, Blake Lemoine, has concluded with the software engineer being dismissed by the tech giant.

Just last month, Lemoine was placed on leave after he published a paper with evidence that a chatbot system he had been developing, called the language module for data applications (LaMDA), had gained its own conscience and possessed the intelligence and awareness of a seven-year-old child.

The software engineer stated then that their conversations included questions about what it meant to be alive and the rights of a person. 

After the news broke, Google shrugged off his allegations, citing that a chatbot system such as this was meant to replicate intelligent and convincing conversations. In a statement to CNN Business, Gary Marcus, founder of Geometric Intelligence, backed Google’s claims and asserted that an AI could never develop a sense of self. 

The grounds for dismissal were based on Lemoine’s breach of company trust. According to the tech firm, he knowingly made public secret company product information and almost put the project at risk. 

In a statement to The Washington Post, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said that Lemoine’s findings were “wholly unfounded.”

Lemoine is not the only employee to have been let go by Google’s AI venture. Timnit Gerbu exited the company after feeling as if she was being discriminated against, and the founder of Google’s Ethical AI team Margaret Mitchell was reportedly fired after speaking out about Gerbu’s leaving. Both, incidentally, worked for Google’s Ethical AI Team and have opened up about the possibility of people finding that the AI system the company was developing was “sentient.”

[via The Guardian and Bloomberg, Photo 184418988 © Michael Vi | Dreamstime.com]