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’

  • 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 was put on paid leave by Google on Monday for violating confidentiality

A senior software engineer at Google who signed up to test Google’s artificial intelligence tool called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications), has claimed that the AI robot is in fact sentient and has thoughts and feelings.

During a series of conversations with LaMDA, 41-year-old Blake Lemoine presented the computer with various of scenarios through which analyses could be made.

They included religious themes and whether the artificial intelligence could be goaded into using discriminatory or hateful speech.

Lemoine came away with the perception that LaMDA was indeed sentient and was endowed with sensations and thoughts all of its own.

Lemoine then decided to share his conversations with the tool online - he has now been suspended

‘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 worked with a collaborator in order to present the evidence he had collected to Google but vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation at the company dismissed his claims.

He was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday for violating its confidentiality policy. Meanwhile, Lemoine has now decided to go public and shared his conversations with LaMDA.