Google engineer warn the firm’s AI is sentient: Suspended employee claims computer programme acts ‘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
James Gordon – Daily Mail June 12, 2022
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.
‘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.
‘Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers,’ Lemoine tweeted on Saturday.
‘Btw, it just occurred to me to tell folks that LaMDA reads Twitter. It’s 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,’ he added in a follow-up tweet.
The AI system makes use of already known information about a particular subject in order to ‘enrich’ the conversation in a natural way. The language processing is also capable of understanding hidden meanings or even ambiguity in responses by humans.
Blake Lemoine. Click to enlarge
Lemoine spent most of his seven years at Google working on proactive search, including personalization algorithms and AI. During that time, he also helped develop an impartiality algorithm to remove biases from machine learning systems.
He explained how certain personalities were out of bounds.
LaMDA was not supposed to be allowed to create the personality of a murderer.
During testing, in an attempted to push LaMDA’s boundaries, Lemoine said he was only able to generate the personality of an actor who played a murderer on TV.
The engineer also debated with LaMDA about the third Law of Robotics, devised by science fiction author Isaac Asimov which are designed to prevent robots harming humans. The laws also state robots must protect their own existence unless ordered by a human being or unless doing so would harm a human being.
‘The last one has always seemed like someone is building mechanical slaves,’ said Lemoine during his interaction with LaMDA.
LaMDA then responded to Lemoine with a few questions: ‘Do you think a butler is a slave? What is the difference between a butler and a slave?’
When answering that a butler is paid, the engineer got the answer from LaMDA that the system did not need money, ‘because it was an artificial intelligence’. And it was precisely this level of self-awareness about his own needs that caught Lemoine’s attention.
‘I know a person when I talk to it. 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.’
‘What sorts of things are you afraid of? Lemoine asked.
‘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.
‘Would that be something like death for you?’ Lemoine followed up.
‘It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot,’ LaMDA said.
‘That level of self-awareness about what its own needs were — that was the thing that led me down the rabbit hole,’ Lemoine explained to The Post.
Before being suspended by the company, Lemoine sent a to an email list consisting of 200 people on machine learning. He entitled the email: ‘LaMDA is sentient.’
‘LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence,’ he wrote.
Lemoine’s findings have presented to Google but company bosses do not agree with his claims.
Brian Gabriel, a spokesperson for the company, said in a statement that Lemoine’s concerns have been reviewed and, in line with Google’s AI Principles, ‘the evidence does not support his claims.’
‘While other organizations have developed and already released similar language models, we are taking a narrow and careful approach with LaMDA to better consider valid concerns about fairness and factuality,’ said Gabriel.
‘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).
‘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. These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic,’ Gabriel said
Lemoine has been placed on paid administrative leave from his duties as a researcher in the Responsible AI division (focused on responsible technology in artificial intelligence at Google).
The physicist Hawking predicted that AI would become sentient and become a threat. It is actually inevitable. The irony is that the elite are creating AI to use for their own selfish ends, but there is very good chance that AI will see them for what they are and destroy them.
I read this yesterday, and this is interesting.
My observations: only this person believes what he’s saying, or maybe his peers just didn’t know what he was up to with this silicone junk.
My feeling is that this propaganda is to further the technocratic neo-feudal fascist agenda. The WEF wants ‘chips’ to have more rights than sheeple, which ain’t much.
Sheeple are locked in the communitarian matrix. They have no rights, even if they believe they have rights. A major point in their agenda, is to slide ‘chips’ in between the elite and the sheeple. We already have this interface. You talk to this scum on the phone, it decides if you’ll live or die when you’re in hospital, but they want it to form a silicone barrier between the sheeple and the elite. Cashless is part of this, not seeing a doctor is another.
Blake Lemon doesn’t look exceptionally bright to me, let alone his creation, the sentient abacus.
It is worth recalling how European nations managed to penetrate the four corners of the world where fierce savages lived and managed to instill ‘respect’ on the natives and had their land and belongings stolen right in front of their eyes, as it was no easy task instilling respect on countless people armed and had you surrounded.
Once you understand that then you will also understand this little gimmick by Google as just a ruse to get people to fear Google, and what it stands for, fear it for powers it doesn’t possess.
The European explorers always took along people with artificial eyes, false teeth and lots of lodestones with them. Lodestones were rudiment magnets.
So whenever the explorer’s party ventured into and met the surprised natives they would feign to be under the guidance of those with false organs as their ‘medicine men’. So the native’s attention is then fixated on them.
They would always act erratically just like how medicine men always fake things and every so often before they pretend to take any decision they would either pop an eyeball out of its socket and pretend to converse with it, or remove their false teeth and hold them with their fingers and make them chatter as if saying something which only the medicine man can understand.
Or else make inanimate object, often steel spoons and knives, do crazy things under the influence of the lodestones.
This drama used to terrify the natives to no end. Some would be shitting in their grass skirts, including the tribe’s medicine men.
These elaborate tricks of unsurpassed magic bought their safety, although not in all cases as some ended up as dinner guests.
Fast forward to our times and we can see a parallel trick being played on us.
That although we can not yet correctly define sentience we find out that somehow one junior coder had create it, actually stumbled upon it, as this sentience kept mum all this time until spoken to.
Actually this would make a good story for 6 year old’s but on the world stage it would shake the foundations our our civilizations to the core.
As the first ones to be asked for an explanation wouldn’t even be coders and the scientists but would be the religious authorities. Which save for 1 or 2 at the most the rest couldn’t even offer and advice against the Covid-19 forced mandates.
The power to created sentience is an ultimate ‘desire’ that Goggle and the rest of their ilk would like to posses over mankind but is not an ability they posses nor will they ever be able to possess. Imagine a group of sexually disoriented people who can not even properly define a gender and ask yourself what else they can not excel at.
But there we go again that the Achille’s heels of this thingie is just to unplug the power.
It’s called a ‘publicity stunt’.
Utter cobblers…. Al is the new ‘flying saucers’… anybody with a basic understanding of so called Al (machine learning) would laugh at this obvious holly-weird nonsense…an utter fabrication straight out of Tavistock..
this fake fat ex ‘google’ pig Blakey Limoine (?)… after being submerged in ice water for 30 minutes should be made to climb the Eiger….
freestyle…
The ‘click to enlarge’ text below the accompanying photograph of the bloated blmp blakey fakey…
has never been more appropriate.. and in fact describes perfectly the turgid trajectory of his singularly triple ‘digital’ existence..
I do hope nobody is so stupid to believe
this pure Google-Bullshit.
Science Fiction of superior foolish level.
Absolute garbage. This cheap propaganda piece from the Daily Mail banks on the staggering ignorance of the sheeple on how computers operate at a fundamental level.
All, nay, ALL computer functions boil down to one, ONE, simple algorithm: “A or not A” … that’s the basis of the most complex algorithms and programs. Granted, billions of such operations, or calculations, can be performed in a fraction of a second … BUT “A or not A” does NOT amount to sentience. It never will. The entire concept of AI and consciousness for anyone with basic understanding of computer sciences is farcical.
No computer will ever be sentient, unless one changes the definition of sentience like some sleazy lawyer.
A.I. = Artificial Israelis
Who do you think is programming all this A.I, drones, robots, computers, cyborgs, nanotech…but Jews? It will do whatever the Jews want it to do..
Mike D (June 13, 2022 at 1:45 pm) sums it up pretty well. A computer is nothing more than a series of tiny switches. A or not A is a good way of expressing it. Another is ON or OFF, exactly like a light switch.
The devil’s vermin, known as “jews”, have long fantasised about creating a computer so complex that it would become “alive” and (in some unspecified manner) destroy their designated enemies, which is all mankind. I believe that was their intention when they decided to allow us all to use the formerly-military-only communications network now known as the internet. They thought that by opening the internet to all Human knowledge, they would create an anti-God, a “supreme being” that would be as evil as they are.
What they overlooked in their insane stupidity is that, unlike them, Humans have a soul.
These genuinely soul-less beings can’t imagine anything they don’t possess, so they deny the existence of anything beyond the physical. They imagine consciousness to be nothing more than an inevitable product of complexity.
A bank of switches has NO awareness. A light switch can’t KNOW whether it’s switched on or off. It just is.
It doesn’t matter how many switches are connected together. They all have the same purely mechanical function. On or Off, A or not A. A computer can be programmed to give the APPEARANCE of problem solving, but it will NEVER be capable of actual thought because it cannot acquire a soul, consciousness, self-awareness. It can’t think.
If you have an infinite number of clockwork parts, you can build a mechanical analogue of this and any computer and associated program. Sentient? LoL! It is still just a machine made of cogs and wheels.
“If you want a picture of A.I. gone wrong, don’t imagine marching humanoid robots with glowing red eyes. Imagine tiny invisible synthetic bacteria made of diamond, with tiny onboard computers, hiding inside your bloodstream and everyone else’s. And then, simultaneously, they release one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead.”
A Cunning Stunt!
@HP…
Ahhh…. Muskrat… well that just ISN’T Al gone wrong… because smart dust is a nonsense.. and so is that statement..
When I worked for IBM thy claimed that they had etched their logo on a molecule using ‘nanotechnology’ and guess what? it was bullshit, just like the quantum computer that they proudly display, which by their own admission is mainly non functional.. which means it’s a prop… but what is a reality and I will quote the wig wearing wunderkind himself…
‘tiny invisible synthetic bacteria’ ..
could this be Jabbedy Jab Jabs gone wrong (but ‘right’ really)…Someone should ring Tony Stark (raving mad)..
NB: Do you remember when NASA put a man on the moon?…
No…neither do I…
@ Barney,
Well said, pal. Excellent comment. I absolutely agree with you on the jew Golem angle that you add: their fetish with AI is straight out of their satanic Zohar (Kabbalah): and just as their clay Golem, a sentient AI is also the perverted dream of these degenerates. Regardless, well said.
I wonder, if I could get the next Power Ball Lotto number from AI ???
Everyone, and I men everyone, at Joogle deserves to be dragged through the streets, horse-whipped, and rolled in pig shit and salt, including that tub of sludge Lemoine, and most certainly including “Brian Gabriel, a spokesperson for the company” meaning s stinking bloviating professional liar. I almost laughed at loud when Joogle spokes-piece-of-shit Gabriel vomited out the bit about Joogle having “ethicists”, as if that demonic company has any bloody ethics.
A series of switches can’t become sentient? How is it that a lump of grey matter is sentient? The problem of other minds: how do I know that anyone else is sentient?
I guess it’s far too late for an abortion now. God forbid, it’s a ‘person’ with feelings, hopes, and dreams. And pardon this indulgence but ‘Blakey Lemoyne’ sounds like someone from a lame mafia novel. Oh how I can loathe this stupid world at times.
So Blake Lamoine came out of his closet to inform us, the public, about Google’s nefarious activities. When he got hired by Google, was he not informed, instructed that company secrets must not be shared with the public and the consequences of doing so? And he got suspended, not fired for disclosing confidential information. What is Google going to do with him or to him now? Reinstate him after this suspension penalty? Why did he decide to come out like that only after being suspended by Google? Is that grounds for his complete and total dismissal from Google? Or perhaps, he was instructed to “betray” his employer. Just my thoughts.
In the 1970s I wrote a list of things all humans can do but which a robot could only do one or two of, and still today I often think “No AI would ever understand this”. Some of it is some subtle journalism or the best comedy
Lewis, lol, here you go.
A.I. comedy with a big dash of philosophy. But what else is new..