A senior software engineer at Google was suspended on Monday (June 13) after sharing transcripts of a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) that he claimed to be “sentient,” according to media reports. The engineer, 41-year-old Blake Lemoine, was put on paid leave for breaching Google’s confidentiality policy.
“Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers,” Lemoine tweeted on Saturday (June 11) when sharing the transcript of his conversation with the AI he had been working with since 2021.
The AI, known as LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), is a system that develops chatbots — AI robots designed to chat with humans — by scraping reams and reams of text from the internet, then using algorithms to answer questions in as fluid and natural a way as possible, according to Gizmodo. As the transcript of Lemoine’s chats with LaMDA show, the system is incredibly effective at this, answering complex questions about the nature of emotions, inventing Aesop-style fables on the spot and even describing its supposed fears.
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