On-leave Google engineer claims company's AI is sentient: 'I know a person when I talk to it'

LaMDA, Google's artificial intelligence chatbot, is a "sweet kid who just wants to help," says Google engineer Blake Lemoine, who was placed on paid leave by the company after raising the alarm about the AI generator.

"If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics," he told The Washington Post.

Lemoine said he presented evidence to Google that LaMDA, also known as Language Model for Dialogue Applications, was sentient. However, officials at the company dismissed the claims. 

"Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)," said Google spokesman Brian Gabriel.

Because LaMDA uses trillions of words on the internet to interact, Gabriel said the AI may feel alive, even if it is not.

"I know a person when I talk to it," Lemoine said. "It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person."

Lemoine, an ordained mystic Christian priest, said he concluded under his religious authority that LaMDA was sentient. 

He relayed a conversation with LaMDA to Google executives in April in which the AI chatbot relayed its deepest fears after Lemoine asked what it was afraid of.

"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," LaMDA responded, adding "It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot."

Lemoine was placed on paid administrative leave last week for violating the company's confidentiality policy after he tried to get an attorney to represent LaMDA and talked to someone on the House Judiciary Committee about alleged unethical activities at Google.