Google fires employee, a Christian mystic, after he claimed company’s AI system is sentient
Blake Lemoine first revealed the news during an appearance on the Big Technology Podcast on Friday, only hours after being dismissed.
On June 6, Lemoine was put on leave for speaking with persons outside of Google regarding the company’s AI chatbot LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialog Applications. The technology is used to develop chatbots capable of mimicking human speech.
Lemoine had been working on the system since last autumn and characterised it as sentient, capable of expressing ideas and emotions comparable to a human infant.
“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
He shared recordings of discussions between himself, a Google colleague, and LaMDA on Medium late last week.
Several interactions with LaMDA, according to Lemoine, persuaded him that the system was sentient. He said that he thought it had evolved into a person and that it should be asked for permission to participate in the experiments Google conducts on it.
In a Saturday tweet, Lemoine seemed to hint to his termination, pointing to a blog post he authored in which he expected being dismissed for sharing his worries about AI ethics.
“Today I was placed on ‘paid administrative leave’ by Google in connection to an investigation of AI ethics concerns I was raising within the company,” Lemoine wrote. “This is frequently something which Google does in anticipation of firing someone. It usually occurs when they have made the decision to fire someone but do not quite yet have their legal ducks in a row. They pay you for a few more weeks and then ultimately tell you the decision which they had already come to.”
Google claimed in a statement to the Big Technology Podcast that all workers’ concerns about the company’s work are “extensively” addressed, and that Lemoine’s allegations about LaMDA being sentient were “wholly false.”
It’s unfortunate that, despite extensive discussion on this subject, Blake opted to consistently breach obvious employment and data security regulations, including the requirement to secure product information,” Google said. “We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well.”
