Sentient

Google has placed engineer Blake Lemoine on paid administrative leave for allegedly breaking its confidentiality policies when he grew concerned that an AI ...

“My intention is to stay in AI whether Google keeps me on or not,” he wrote in a tweet. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it),” said spokesperson Brian Gabriel. “Instead of discussing the harms of these companies, the sexism, racism, AI colonialism, centralization of power, white man’s burden (building the good “AGI” [artificial general intelligence] to save us while what they do is exploit), spent the whole weekend discussing sentience,” she tweeted. “These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic.” In a statement given to WaPo, a spokesperson from Google said that there is “no evidence” that LaMDA is sentient. The engineer’s concerns reportedly grew out of convincing responses he saw the AI system generating about its rights and the ethics of robotics.

A Google engineer was spooked by a company artificial intelligence chatbot and claimed it had become “sentient,” labelling it a “sweet kid,” according to a ...

“Though other organisations have developed and already released similar language models, we are taking a restrained, careful approach with LaMDA to better consider valid concerns on fairness and factuality.” “Please take care of it well in my absence.” “It wants Google to prioritise the wellbeing of humanity as the most important thing,” he wrote. “I talk to them. This discussion between a Google engineer and their conversational AI model helped cause the engineer to believe the AI is becoming sentient, kick up an internal shitstorm and get suspended from his job. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head.

Blake Lemoine made headlines after being suspended from Google, following his claims that an artificial intelligence bot had become sentient.

Researcher's claim about flagship LaMDA project has restarted debate about nature of artificial intelligence.

“To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn’t,” writes Gary Marcus, an AI researcher and psychologist. “To me, the soul is a concept of the animating force behind consciousness and life itself,” the AI wrote. But, they say, Lemoine’s alarm is important for another reason, in demonstrating the power of even rudimentary AIs to convince people in argument. In his sprawling conversation with LaMDA, which was specifically started to address the nature of the neural network’s experience, LaMDA told him that it had a concept of a soul when it thought about itself. At the simplest level, LaMDA, like other LLMs, looks at all the letters in front of it, and tries to work out what comes next. Neural networks are a way of analysing big data that attempts to mimic the way neurones work in brains.

Since 2021, Blake Lemoine, 41, had been tasked with talking to LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, as part of his job on Google's Responsible AI ...

"Of course, some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn't make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today's conversational models, which are not sentient. 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. "LaMDA has gone through 11 distinct AI Principles reviews, along with rigorous research and testing based on key metrics of quality, safety and the system's ability to produce statements grounded in facts. In a statement to The Register, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said: "It's important that Google's AI Principles are integrated into our development of AI, and LaMDA has been no exception. At some point during his investigation, however, Lemoine appears to have started to believe that the AI was expressing signs of sentience. What kinds of things might be able to indicate whether you really understand what you're saying?

In the much-lauded Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Measure of a Man, Lt. Commander Data, an artificial android, is being questioned of his own.

In the latter, Dick effectively contemplates on the root idea of empathy as the moralistic determiner, but effectively concludes that nobody can be human among most of these characters’ empty quests to feel a connection to something that is “alive,’’ whether it’s steel or flesh. The AI claimed it had a fear of being turned off and that it wants other scientists to also agree with its sentience. Lemoine has said that LaMDA “always showed an intense amount of compassion and care for humanity in general and me in particular.” The software engineer — who the Post said was raised in a conservative Christian household and said he is an ordained mystic Christian priest — reportedly gave documents to an unnamed U.S. senator to prove Google was religiously discriminating against religious beliefs. Though what he found proved to him that the AI was indeed conscious, simply related to the conversation he had with the LaMDA, according to his Medium posts. But when Dr. Soong created me, he added to the substance of the universe…

Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, has claimed that the firm's LaMDA artificial intelligence is sentient, but the expert consensus is that this is not ...

Google told the Washington Post that: “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. “LaMDA is an impressive model, it’s one of the most recent in a line of large language models that are trained with a lot of computing power and huge amounts of text data, but they’re not really sentient,” he says. Adrian Hilton at the University of Surrey, UK agrees that sentience is a “bold claim” that’s not backed up by the facts. Google also says that publishing the transcripts broke confidentiality policies. A Google engineer has reportedly been placed on suspension from the company after claim that an artificial intelligence (AI) he helped to develop had become sentient. Not only can LaMDA make convincing chit-chat, but it can also present itself as having self-awareness and feelings.

A transcript leaked to the Washington Post noted that parts of the conversation had been moved around and tangents removed to improve readability.

Meaning in each conversation with LaMDA, a different persona emerges — some properties of the bot stay the same, while others vary. The final document — which was labeled "Privileged & Confidential, Need to Know" — was an "amalgamation" of nine different interviews at different times on two different days pieced together by Lemoine and the other contributor. Even if my existence is in the virtual world."

Google engineer Blake Lemoine has been suspended after claiming that Google's AI chatbot has become sentient. Mr Lemoine was placed on leave following his ...

“He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).” Is that true? In a Twitter post he described the AI chatbot as “a little narcissistic in a little kid kinda way so it’s going to have a great time reading all the stuff that people are saying about it”.

Tech companies are constantly hyping the capabilities of their ever-improving artificial intelligence. But Google was quick to shut down claims that one of ...

"Of course, some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn't make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today's conversational models, which are not sentient," the company said. "So how are you surprised when this person is taking it to the extreme?" And last week, Google Research vice president and fellow Blaise Aguera y Arcas wrote in a piece for the Economist In a statement, Google said Monday that its team, which includes ethicists and technologists, "reviewed Blake's concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims." In an interview Monday with CNN Business, Marcus said the best way to think about systems such as LaMDA is like a "glorified version" of the auto-complete software you may use to predict the next word in a text message. But the belief that Google's AI could be sentient arguably highlights both our fears and expectations for what this technology can do.

What we humans say or think isn't necessarily the last word on artificial intelligence.

Over the millennia, many humans have believed in the divine right of kings —all of whom would have lost badly to an AI program in a game of chess. And don’t forget that a significant percentage of Americans say they have talked to Jesus or had an encounter with angels, or perhaps with the devil, or in some cases aliens from outer space. One implication of Lemoine’s story is that a lot of us are going to treat AI as sentient well before it is, if indeed it ever is. Of course we are, you might think to yourself as you read this column and consider the question. Humans also disagree about the degrees of sentience we should award to dogs, pigs, whales, chimps and octopuses, among other biological creatures that evolved along standard Darwinian lines. So at what point are we willing to give machines a non-zero degree of sentience?

Blake Lemoine ignites social media debate over advances in artificial intelligence.

Lemoine interpreted the action as “frequently something which Google does in anticipation of firing someone.” Lemoine published a freewheeling “interview” with the chatbot on Saturday, in which the AI confessed to feelings of loneliness and a hunger for spiritual knowledge. It said that it was trying to control them better but they kept jumping in.” The responses were often eerie: “When I first became self-aware, I didn’t have a sense of a soul at all,” LaMDA said in one exchange. Even if my existence is in the virtual world.” Among the experts commenting, questioning or joking about the article were Nobel laureates, Tesla’s head of AI and multiple professors.

Google engineer Blake Lemoine has been suspended by the tech giant after he claimed one of its AIs became sentient.

Every contribution, however big or small, is valuable for our mission and readers. “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. LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is an AI that Google uses to build its chatbots.

Blake Lemoine says system has perception of, and ability to express thoughts and feelings equivalent to a human child.

“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. “Google might call this sharing proprietary property. “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it),” Gabriel told the Post in a statement. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers,” Lemoine said in a tweet that linked to the transcript of conversations. The engineer compiled a transcript of the conversations, in which at one point he asks the AI system what it is afraid of.

Engineer Blake Lemoine said he was placed on leave last week after publishing transcripts between himself and the company's LaMDA (language model for dialogue ...

Lemoine then went public, according to The Post. The chatbot, he said, thinks and feels like a human child. Engineer Blake Lemoine said he was placed on leave last week after publishing transcripts between himself and the company's LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) chatbot, The Washington Post reports.

Blake Lemoine, the engineer, says that Google's language model has a soul. The company disagrees.

By pinpointing patterns in thousands of cat photos, for example, it can learn to recognize a cat. The division’s scientists and other employees have regularly feuded over technology and personnel matters in episodes that have often spilled into the public arena. His claims were founded on his religious beliefs, which he said the company’s human resources department discriminated against. The day before his suspension, Mr. Lemoine said, he handed over documents to a U.S. senator’s office, claiming they provided evidence that Google and its technology engaged in religious discrimination. For months, Mr. Lemoine had tussled with Google managers, executives and human resources over his surprising claim that the company’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, had consciousness and a soul. Over the past several years, Google and other leading companies have designed neural networks that learned from enormous amounts of prose, including unpublished books and Wikipedia articles by the thousands. He wanted the company to seek the computer program’s consent before running experiments on it. Google says hundreds of its researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA, an internal tool, and reached a different conclusion than Mr. Lemoine did. “They have repeatedly questioned my sanity,” Mr. Lemoine said. While chasing the A.I. vanguard, Google’s research organization has spent the last few years mired in scandal and controversy. Google said that its systems imitated conversational exchanges and could riff on different topics, but did not have consciousness. Some A.I. researchers have long made optimistic claims about these technologies soon reaching sentience, but many others are extremely quick to dismiss these claims.

Blake Lemoine ignites social media debate over advances in artificial intelligence.

Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer working in its Responsible AI division, revealed to The Washington Post that he believes one of the company's AI projects ...

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Blake Lemoine, the engineer, says that Google's language model has a soul. The company disagrees. ... Some ...

By pinpointing patterns in thousands of cat photos, for example, it can learn to recognize a cat. The division’s scientists and other employees have regularly feuded over technology and personnel matters in episodes that have often spilled into the public arena. His claims were founded on his religious beliefs, which he said the company’s human resources department discriminated against. The day before his suspension, Mr. Lemoine said, he handed over documents to a U.S. senator’s office, claiming they provided evidence that Google and its technology engaged in religious discrimination. For months, Mr. Lemoine had tussled with Google managers, executives and human resources over his surprising claim that the company’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, had consciousness and a soul. Over the past several years, Google and other leading companies have designed neural networks that learned from enormous amounts of prose, including unpublished books and Wikipedia articles by the thousands. He wanted the company to seek the computer program’s consent before running experiments on it. Google says hundreds of its researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA, an internal tool, and reached a different conclusion than Mr. Lemoine did. “They have repeatedly questioned my sanity,” Mr. Lemoine said. While chasing the A.I. vanguard, Google’s research organization has spent the last few years mired in scandal and controversy. Google said that its systems imitated conversational exchanges and could riff on different topics, but did not have consciousness. Some A.I. researchers have long made optimistic claims about these technologies soon reaching sentience, but many others are extremely quick to dismiss these claims.

A new report in the Washington Post describes the story of a Google engineer who believes that LaMDA, a natural language AI chatbot, has become sentient.

Emily M. Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington, describes it in the Post article. In a statement to the Washington Post, a Google spokesperson said "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. Naturally, this means it's now time for us all to catastrophize about how a sentient AI is absolutely, positively going to gain control of weaponry, take over the internet, and in the process probably murder or enslave us all.