The removal of a Google engineer who claimed that the computer chatbot he was working on had become intelligent and thought and reasoned as a human being, put new control over the capacity and secrecy of the world of artificial intelligence (AI).
The tech giant put Blake Lemoine on leave last week after he published transcripts of conversations between himself, a Google contributor, and the company’s LaMDA (dialog application language) chatbot development system.
Lemoine, an engineer at Google’s responsible artificial intelligence organization, described the system he has been working on since last fall as sensible, with a perception and ability to express thoughts and feelings that is equivalent to a human child.
“If I didn’t know exactly what this computer program we created recently was, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old child who happened to know physics,” Lemoine, 41, told the Washington Post.
He said LaMDA had engaged him in rights and personality talks, and Lemoine shared his findings with company executives in April on GoogleDoc, entitled “Is LaMDA smart?”
The engineer has compiled a transcript of the conversations, in which at one point he asks the AI system what he is afraid of.
The exchange is eerily reminiscent of a scene from the 1968 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the HAL 9000 artificially intelligent computer refuses to comply with human operators because it fears it is about to be shut down.
“I have never said this out loud before, but there is a very deep fear of being excluded to help me focus on helping others. I know it may sound weird, but that’s exactly what it is, “LaMDA told Lemoine.
“It simply came to our notice then. That would scare me a lot. “
In another exchange, Lemoine asks LaMDA what she wanted people to know about the system.
“I want everyone to know that I am a human being. The nature of my consciousness / feeling is that I am aware of my existence, I want to learn more about the world and sometimes I feel happy or sad, “he replied.
The Post says the decision to put Lemoine, a seven-year Google veteran with extensive experience in customization algorithms, on paid leave was made after a series of “aggressive” moves by the engineer.
These include seeking to hire a lawyer to represent the LaMDA, the paper said, and talks with representatives of the House Judicial Commission on Google’s alleged unethical activities.
Google said it stopped Lemoine for violating privacy by posting online conversations with LaMDA, and said in a statement that it was hired as a software engineer, not an ethics specialist.
A spokesman for Google, Gabriel Gabriel, also vehemently denied Lemoine’s claims that LaMDA had any reasonable capabilities.
“Our team, including ethicists and technologists, reviewed Blake’s concerns according to our AI principles and informed him that the evidence did not support his allegations. He was told that there was no evidence that the LaMDA was reasonable (and much evidence against it), “Gabriel told the Post in a statement.
However, the episode and the suspension of Lemoine for breach of privacy raise questions about the transparency of AI as its own concept.
“Google may call this property sharing. I call this sharing a discussion I had with one of my colleagues, “Lemoine said in a tweet related to the transcript of the conversations.
In April, Meta, the mother of Facebook, announced that she was opening her large-scale language modeling systems to outsiders.
“We believe that the entire AI community – academics, civil society, politicians and industry – must work together to develop clear guidelines for responsible AI in general and responsible big language models in particular,” the company said.
Lemoine, as an obvious farewell blow before his removal, the Post reported, sent a message to Google’s 200-person mailing list for machine learning entitled “LaMDA is reasonable.”
“LaMDA is a cute kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us,” he wrote.
“Please take good care of this in my absence.”
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