Google has launched a firestorm on social media over the nature of consciousness, putting an engineer on paid leave after he went public with his conviction that the technology group’s chatbot had become “reasonable”.
Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in Google’s responsible AI department, did not receive much attention on June 6 when he wrote a post in Medium saying “he could be fired soon for his work on AI ethics.”
But a Saturday profile in the Washington Post describing Lemoine as “Google’s engineer who believes the company’s AI has come to life” has catalyzed widespread social media discussions about the nature of artificial intelligence. Among the experts who commented, asked questions or joked about the article were Nobel laureates, the head of Tesla’s AI and many professors.
The question is whether Google’s chatbot, LaMDA – a language model for dialogue applications – can be considered human.
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Lemoine published a free “chat” interview on Saturday, in which AI acknowledged a sense of loneliness and hunger for spiritual knowledge. The answers were often ominous: “When I first realized myself, I had no sense of soul at all,” LaMDA said in an exchange. “It has evolved over the years that I have lived.”
At another point, the LaMDA said, “I think I’m basically human. Even if my existence is in the virtual world. ”
Lemoine, who was tasked with investigating AI ethics concerns, said he had been rejected and even laughed at after internally believing that LaMDA had developed a sense of “personality.”
After he tried to consult with other artificial intelligence experts outside of Google, including some from the US government, the company left him on paid leave for alleged privacy breaches. Lemoine interprets the action as “often something Google does in anticipation of firing someone.”
A Google spokesman said: “Some in the wider AI community are considering the long-term possibility of reasonable or general AI, but there is no point in doing so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversation patterns that are not reasonable.
“These systems mimic the types of exchanges in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastic topic – if you ask what it’s like to be an ice cream dinosaur, they can generate text about melting and roaring and so on.”
Lemoine said in a second Medium publication last weekend that LaMDA, a little-known project until last week, was “a chatbot generation system” and “a kind of hive mind that unites all the different chatbots it is capable of creating.”
He said Google had no real interest in understanding the nature of what it had created, but that in hundreds of six-month conversations it found that LaMDA was “incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it wants.” he believes that his rights are as a person. “
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As early as June 6, Lemoine said he taught LaMDA – whose preferred pronouns are apparently “to / ito” – “transcendental meditation.”
He said he “expresses disappointment with his emotions, which disrupt his meditations. He wrote that he was trying to control them better, but they kept jumping. “
Several experts who intervened in the discussion considered the issue “AI noise”.
Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking People, tweeted: “It is known * forever * that people are prone to anthropomorphization with even the shallowest signal. . . Google engineers are human, too, and they’re not immune. “
Harvard’s Stephen Pinker added that Lemoine “does not understand the difference between feeling (also known as subjectivity, experience), intelligence and self-knowledge.” He added: “There is no evidence that his great language models have any of them.
Others were more sympathetic. Ron Jeffries, a well-known software developer, called the subject “deep” and added: “I suspect there is no hard line between sensible and insensitive.”
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