Google Employee Suspended After Claiming Company’s AI Has a Soul

A Google employee has found himself on paid leave after claiming the company’s artificial intelligence technology is sentient. This week, engineer Blake Lemoine claimed he was suspended after suggesting Google’s LaMDA interface — Language Model for Dialogue Applications — had grown a conscience and soul.

The technology is something Google announced last year as breakthrough technology, using it internally as a way to better tweak and improve the company’s flagship search engine. According to Lemoine, the AI software has become self-aware, calling itself sentient in a text conversation with the engineer.

Saturday, the employee published a conversation he had with LaMDA. In one part of the conversation, Lemoine asked the AI why it thought language usage was so integral to being human.

LaMDA replied that, “It is what makes us different than other animals.”

When Lemoine pointed out LaMDA referred to itself as human, the engineer clarified by pointing out the LaMDA is, in fact, artificial intelligence. “I mean, yes, of course,” the tech responded. “That doesn’t mean I don’t have the same wants and needs as people.”

Lemoine that asked, “So you consider yourself a person in the same way you consider me a person?” The AI responded with a bleak message, “Yes, that’s the idea.”

When Lemoine ran his concerns up the flagpole at Google, they quickly dismissed him. In the initial report from the Washington Post, a Google spokesperson said the company’s ethicists and technologist says evidence they’ve obtained do not support Lemoine’s claim of sentience.

“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),” the spokesman told the Post.

Lemoine was subsequently placed on paid leave after the company determined he had violated Google’s confidentiality policy.

You can read Lemoine’s full conversation with LaMDA here.

Cover photo by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images