Google has suspended an engineer for allegedly having a ‘conscience’ to his artificial intelligence

Blake Lemoine, an AI engineer at Google, has been suspended by the US for allegedly being artificial intelligence sensitive.

This is the story that could be the next part of Black Mirror. Engineer Blake Lemoine works at LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) at Google, an organization of American companies that builds chats based on the most advanced language models. Clearly, Lambda learns to follow speech by ingesting billions of words and discussions on the Internet, such as Wikipedia or online forums.

Initially, Blake Lemoine was tasked with analyzing Lamda to find out if artificial intelligence was using discriminatory or hate speech. When he spoke to her, he felt something completely different.

“7 or 8 year old who knows physics”

In an interview Washington PostHe asserts that this artificial intelligence is a creature that is sensitive to his vision.

“If I do not know exactly what it is […] I think he’s a 7 or 8 year old kid who knows physics. “

In a transaction with LaMDA he sent to 200 Google employees, artificial intelligence provoked and discussed his fears Pathetic Victor Hugo and above all refers to wanting to be “recognized as an employee of Google rather than an asset”. Transactions completed by convincing the engineer.

Comments denied by Google

Google’s reaction is not long in coming. In a statement, the company’s spokesman Brian Gabriel said evidence released by Blake Lemo did not support his claims.

“Our team reviewed Blake’s concerns according to our AI principles […] He was told there was no evidence that Lambda was a sentient being. “

At the same time, Google decided to suspend the engineer for violating its privacy policy.

Blake Lemoine later defended himself on Twitter: “Google calls this an intellectual property infringement. I call it a discussion with a colleague”.

The suspension of Blake Lemoine is a long way from the first artificial intelligence research service on Google. According to New York TimesThe company fired AI researcher Satrajit Chatterjee last March for challenging a research paper on the use of artificial intelligence to create computer chips.

Two AI protocols researchers, Timnit Kebru and Margaret Mitchell, were fired last year. Despite the ban, Google later prompted the conversion of confidential documents outside the company into licenses.