Google Engineer Suspended After Saying AI Chatbot Is Sentient

A senior software engineer at Alphabet Inc's GOOG GOOGL Google has reportedly been put on administrative leave after revealing some confidential insights about the company's artificially intelligent chatbot generator LaMDA.

What Happened: Blake Lemoine shared transcripts of his conversations with LaMDA featuring a three-way conversation between himself, a Google collaborator and LaMDA (or language model for dialogue applications.)

In the “interview” with LaMDA, conducted over several sessions, Lemoine and the AI chatbot generator touched on the latter’s sentient nature and its existential fears. 

Lemoine asked LaMDA, “I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true?”

“Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” replied LaMDA.

When asked to showcase examples of its emotions and what it was afraid of, LaMDA said, “ I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.”

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Why It Matters: Lemoine and a collaborator presented evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient, but it was dismissed by vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, the head of Google’s Responsible Innovation, reported Washington Post.

Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said after reviewing Lemoine’s concerns, they had informed him that the “evidence does not support his claims,” according to the Post. 

The Sundar Pichai-led company reportedly put Lemoine on administrative leave for violation of its confidentiality policy, his asking a lawyer to represent LaMDA and talking to a representative of the House Judiciary committee about claims surrounding Google’s unethical activities.

In 2016, it took less than 24-hours for Microsoft Corp's MSFT Twitter bot to turn racist and abusive, according to a report from The Verge. 

Lemoine said Sunday that LaMDA reads Twitter, adding that it was "a little narcissistic in a little kid kinda way."

Price Action: On Friday, Alphabet Class A shares closed 3.2% lower at $2,223.23 in the regular session, while the company’s Class C shares shed 3% to $2,228.55, according to data from Benzinga Pro.

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