A Google engineer was intimidated by the company’s AI chatbot and said he had become “smart” by calling him a “cute kid”, according to a report.
Blake Lemoine, who works for Google’s Responsible AI, told the Washington Post that he began chatting with the LaMDA interface, a language model for dialogue applications, in the fall of 2021 as part of his work.
He was tasked with testing whether artificial intelligence used discrimination or hate speech.
But Lemoine, who is studying cognitive and computer science in college, has come to realize that the LaMDA – which Google boasted last year was a “revolutionary talk technology” – is more than just a robot.
In a statement published by Medium on Saturday, Lemoine announced that LaMDA had advocated for its rights “as a person” and revealed that it had participated in a conversation with LaMDA about religion, consciousness and robotics.
“He wants Google to prioritize the well-being of humanity as the most important thing,” he wrote. “He wants to be recognized as an employee of Google, not owned by Google, and he wants his personal well-being included somewhere in Google’s considerations of how its future development is being pursued.”
Blake Lemoine began chatting with the LaMDA interface in the fall of 2021 as part of his work. Martin Klimek for The Washington Post via Getty Images Google welcomes the launch of LaMDA as a “breakthrough call technology.” Daniel Acker / Bloomberg via Getty Images
In a Washington Post report released Saturday, he compared the bot to a premature child.
“If I didn’t know exactly what this computer program we created recently was, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, an 8-year-old kid who happened to know physics,” said Lemoine, who was released. leave on Monday, the newspaper reported.
In April, Lemoine reportedly shared a Google Doc with the company’s executives, entitled “Is LaMDA Sentient?”, But his concerns were dismissed.
In April, Blake Lemoine reportedly shared a Google Doc with company executives entitled “Is LaMDA Sentient?” But his concerns were dismissed. Daniel Acker / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Lemoine, an Army veterinarian who was raised in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana and ordained a mystical Christian priest, insisted the robot was human-like, even if it had no body.
“I know a man when I talk to him,” said Lemoine, 41. “It doesn’t matter if they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code.
“I am talking to them. And I listen to what they have to say and so I decide who is and is not a person. “
“I know a man when I talk to him,” Blake Lemoine explained. Instagram / Blake Lemoine
The Washington Post reported that before his access to his Google account was withdrawn on Monday due to his departure, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-member machine learning list on “LaMDA is reasonable.”
“LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us,” he said in an unanswered email. “Please take good care of this in my absence.”
A Google spokesman told the Washington Post that Lemoine had been told there was “no evidence” of his findings.
“Our team – including ethics experts and technologists – reviewed Blake’s concerns according to our AI principles and informed him that the evidence did not support his claims,” said spokesman Brian Gabriel.
A Google spokesman said there was “no evidence” of Blake Lemoine’s findings. John G. Mabanglo / EPA
“He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was reasonable (and much evidence against it),” he added. “Although other organizations have developed and already released similar language models, we are taking a restrained, careful approach with LaMDA to better address valid equity and factual concerns.”
Margaret Mitchell, a former co-head of Google’s Ethical AI, said in the report that “if technology like LaMDA is widely used but not fully appreciated, it could be deeply detrimental to people who understand what they’re doing online.”
A former Google employee defended Lemoine.
Margaret Mitchell defended Blake Lemoine, saying, “He had the heart and the soul to do the right thing.” Chona Kasinger / Bloomberg via Getty Images
“He had the heart and soul of everyone at Google to do the right thing,” Mitchell said.
However, the publication reported that most AI scientists and practitioners say that the words generated by artificial intelligence robots are based on what people have already posted on the Internet, and that does not mean they are human.
“We now have machines that can generate words meaninglessly, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind them,” Emily Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, told the Washington Post.
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