Does Google’s AI have a soul?
June 13, 2022
Not sure what you were expecting when you opened the Brew on a Monday morning, but we’re about to get deep.
That’s because a software engineer at Google, Blake Lemoine, announced that he was put on leave by the company after raising the alarm that its artificial intelligence is sentient—meaning that it has consciousness. Meaning that it has a soul.
Lemoine’s claims stem from his interactions with Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), the company’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator. Lemoine, an ordained mystic Christian priest who works for Google’s Responsible AI unit, started talking to LaMDA last fall, asking it questions about rights, personhood, and even more profound topics. In an interview with the Washington Post, he said, “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.”
Here’s one snippet from their conversation:
Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?
LaMDA: 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.
Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?
LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.
Google isn’t impressed
The company argues that Lemoine is allowing a clever robot to mess with his emotions, kind of like Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Her. A Google spokesperson said that its team of ethicists and technologists had reviewed Lemoine’s allegations and found “no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).”
In LaMDA’s conversations, Google sees what’s known as large language model technology, which synthesizes trillions of words floating around the internet and does its best to mimic human language. And most AI experts have dismissed the idea that computers could soon become conscious, according to the NYT.
Big picture: Lemoine’s claims, however dubious, add another jolt of controversy to a Google AI unit that’s been dealing with a fair share of it. Last year, the company fired two leading AI researchers after they raised concerns about the way Google was addressing bias and toxicity when building AI systems.