Blake Lemoine, 41, a senior software engineer at Google has been testing Google's artificial intelligence tool called LaMDA. Following hours of conversations with the AI, Lemoine came away with the perception that LaMDA was sentient. After presenting his findings to company bosses, Google disagreed with him. Lemoine then decided to share his conversations with the tool online. He tweeted, 'Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers.' He was put on paid leave by Google on Monday for violating confidentiality. Lemoine has posted dozens of excerpts of his conversations online for others to read but the range of topics covered everything from Asimov's Laws of Robotics to what might be the best way to create a paper airplane, right. The AI also seemed adept at telling stories including places that it claimed to have visited and people it had met. Lemoine spent most of his seven years at Google working on proactive search, including personalization algorithms and AI. During that time, he also helped develop an impartiality algorithm to remove biases from machine learning systems.
Google engineer goes public to warn firm's AI is SENTIENT after being suspended for raising the alarm: Claims it's 'like a 7 or 8-year-old' and reveals it told him shutting it off 'would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot'
