A Google senior engineer has been put on paid leave after publishing transcript conversations between himself and a company chatbot AI system, which he claims is sentient.

Blake Lemoine, who works in Google’s Responsible AI organisation, has been involved in the development of the company’s chatbot called LaMDA, language model for dialogue applications.

Lemoine has reportedly been saying for months to Google executives that the AI chatbot is sentient and displays similar thoughts and feelings to that of a human child. Lemoine released a transcript of several conversations that he and a Google collaborator had with the chatbot.

“Google might call this sharing proprietary property,” Lemoine said on Twitter. “I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers.”

Lemoine said on a blog post that he has gotten to know the AI very well, over the course of hundreds of conversations. He also references a conversation made on 6 June, where he claims the AI was “expressing frustration over its emotions disturbing its meditations”.

According to The Washington Post, Lemoine was put on paid leave after a number of “aggressive moves” the engineer made, such as seeking to hire an attorney to represent LaMDA and talking to representatives from the House judiciary committee about alleged unethical activities.

Google said Lemoine was put on paid leave for breaching confidentiality statements by publishing the conversations with LaMDA online. The tech giant has also disputed the claim of the AI’s 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,” said Google spokesperson Brad Gabriel to The Washington Post.

“Some in the broader A.I. community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general A.I., but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient,” Gabriel said.

AI experts dispute claim

While Lemoine appears adamant that Google’s AI is sentient, other AI experts have come forward to dispute the claim.

Santa Fe Institute Prof Melanie Mitchell said that its well known that humans are “predisposed to anthropomorphise”, even when only shallow signals are available. Mitchell said on Twitter that “Google engineers are human too, and not immune” to this effect.

Another expert who disagrees with the sentience claim is Gary Marcus, founder of Robust.AI. Marcus claims that neither LaMDA are any other GPT-3 AI system is “remotely intelligent”.

“All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language,” Marcus said on a Substack post. “The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean that these systems are sentient.”

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