Google Engineer Says Lamda Ai Has Developed Feelings, Gets Suspended

Despite that, the program “has no continuity of self, no sense of the passage of time, and no understanding of a world beyond a text prompt.” LaMDA, they say, “is only ever going to be a fancy chatbot.” Skynet will probably have to wait. On June 11, The Washington Post published a story about Blake Lemoine, an engineer for Google’s Responsible AI organization, who claimed that LaMDA had become sentient. He came to his conclusions after a series of admittedly startling conversations he had with the chatbot where it eventually “convinced” him that it was aware of itself, its purpose, and even its own mortality. LaMDA also allegedly challenged Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics, which states that a robot should protect its existence as long as it doesn’t harm a human or a human orders it otherwise. Google AI researcher explains why the technology may be ‘sentient’ The Google computer scientist who was placed on leave after claiming the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot has come to life tells NPR how he formed his opinion. The Alphabet-run AI development team put him on paid leave for breaching company policy by sharing confidential information about the project, he said in a Medium post. In another post Lemoine published conversations he said he and a fellow researcher had with LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. As per a news story by IGN, a software engineer from Google claims that the AI chatbot of the search engine has become sentient or somewhat human-like.

• He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient ,” Gabriel told the Post in a statement.
• A Google engineer was spooked by a company artificial intelligence chatbot and claimed it had become “sentient,” labeling it a “sweet kid,” according to a report.
• As for LaMDA, it’s hard to tell what’s actually going on without Google being more open about the AI’s progress.
• He came to his conclusions after a series of admittedly startling conversations he had with the chatbot where it eventually “convinced” him that it was aware of itself, its purpose, and even its own mortality.
• “Effectively, the test studies whether the interrogator can determine which is computer and which is human,” AI expert Noel Sharkey wrote for the BBC in 2012.

Generating emotional response is what allows people to find attachment to others, to interpret meaning in art and culture, to love and even yearn for things, including inanimate ones such as physical places and the taste of favorite foods. Really, Lemoine was admitting that he was bewitched by LaMDA—a reasonable, understandable, and even laudable sensation. I have been bewitched myself, by the distinctive smell of evening and by art nouveau metro-station signs and by certain types of frozen carbonated beverages. The automata that speak to us via chat are likely to be meaningful because we are predisposed to find them so, not because they have crossed the threshold into sentience. Weizenbaum’s therapy bot used simple patterns to find prompts from its human interlocutor, turning them around into pseudo-probing prompts. Trained on reams of actual human speech, LaMDA uses neural networks to generate plausible outputs (“replies,” if you must) from chat prompts. LaMDA is no more alive, no more sentient, than Eliza, but it is much more powerful and flexible, able to riff on an almost endless number of topics instead of just pretending to be a psychiatrist. That makes LaMDA more likely to ensorcell users, and to ensorcell more of them in a greater variety of contexts. In other words, a Google engineer became convinced that a software program was sentient after asking the program, which was designed to respond credibly to input, whether it was sentient.

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As an engineer on Google’s Responsible AI team, he should understand the technical operation of the software better than most anyone, and perhaps be fortified against its psychotropic qualities. Years ago, Weizenbaum had thought that understanding the technical operation of a computer system would mitigate its power to deceive, like revealing a magician’s trick. For one thing, computer systems are hard to explain to people ; for another, even the creators of modern machine-learning systems can’t always explain how their systems make decisions. A Google engineer was spooked by a company artificial intelligence chatbot and claimed it had become “sentient,” labeling it a “sweet kid,” according to a report.

“It is mimicking perceptions or feelings from the training data it was given — smartly and specifically designed to seem like it understands,” Jana Eggers, head of AI startup Nara Logics, told Bloomberg. Sandra Wachter, a professor at the University of Oxford, told Business Insider that “we are far away from creating a machine that is akin to humans and the capacity for thought.” Even Google’s engineers that have had conversations with LaMDA believe otherwise. An AI program eventually gaining sentience has been a topic of hot debate in the community for a while now, but Google’s involvement with a project as advanced as LaMDA put it in the limelight with a more intense fervor than ever. However, not many experts are buying into Lemoine’s claims about having eye-opening conversations with LaMDA and it being a person. Experts have classified it as just another AI product that is good at conversations because it has been trained to mimic human language, but it hasn’t gained sentience.

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People have tried stymying image recognition by asking users to identify, say, pigs, but making the pigs cartoons and giving them sunglasses. Researchers have looked into asking users to identify objects in Magic Eye-like blotches. In an intriguing variation, researchers in 2010 proposed using CAPTCHAs to index ancient petroglyphs, computers not being very good at deciphering gestural sketches of reindeer scrawled on cave walls. The bot managed to be incredibly convincing and produced deceptively intelligent responses to user questions. Today, you can chat with ELIZA yourself from the comfort of your home. To us, it might seem fairly archaic but there was a time when it was highly impressive, and laid the groundwork for some of the most sophisticated AI bots today—including one that at least one engineer claims is conscious. “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,” spokesperson Brian Gabriel told The Washington Post. After testing an advanced Google-designed artificial intelligence chatbot late last year, cognitive and computer science expert Blake Lemoine boldly told his employer that the machine showed a sentient side and might have a soul. Blake Lemoine’s own delirium shows just how potent this drug has become.

But maybe our humanity isn’t measured by how we perform with a task, but in how we move through the world — or in this case, through the internet. Rather than tests, he favors something called “continuous authentication,” essentially observing the behavior of a user and looking for signs of automation. “A real human being doesn’t have very good control over their own motor functions, and so they can’t move the mouse the same way more than once over multiple interactions, even if they try really hard,” Ghosemajumder says. While a bot will interact with a page without moving a mouse, or by moving a mouse very precisely, human actions have “entropy” that is hard to spoof, Ghosemajumder says. The example she points to is the use of AI to sentence criminal defendants. The problem is the machine-learning systems used in those cases were trained on historical sentencing information—data that’s inherently racially biased. As a result, communities of color and other populations that have been historically targeted by law enforcement receive harsher sentences due to the AI that are replicating the biases. Edelson was one of the many computer scientists, engineers, and AI researchers who grew frustrated at the framing of the story and the subsequent discourse it spurred. For them, though, one of the biggest issues is that the story gives people the wrong idea of how AI works and could very well lead to real-world consequences. Lemoine’s story also doesn’t provide enough evidence to make the case that the AI is conscious in any way.

In the mid-1960s, an MIT engineer named Joseph Weizenbaum developed a computer program that has come to be known as Eliza. It was similar in form to LaMDA; users interacted with it by typing inputs and reading the program’s textual replies. Eliza was modeled after a Rogerian psychotherapist, a newly popular form of therapy that mostly pressed the patient to fill in gaps (“Why do you think you hate your mother?”). Those sorts of open-ended questions were easy for computers to generate, even 60 years ago. InMedium google ai bots postpublished on Saturday, Lemoine declared LaMDA had advocated for its rights “as a person,” and revealed that he had engaged in conversation with LaMDA about religion, consciousness, and robotics. In April, Lemoine reportedly shared a Google Doc with company executives titled, “Is LaMDA Sentient? InMedium postpublished last Saturday, Lemoine declared LaMDA had advocated for its rights “as a person,” and revealed that he had engaged in conversation with LaMDA about religion, consciousness, and robotics.

Researchers call Google’s AI technology a “neural network,” since it rapidly processes a massive amount of information and begins to pattern-match in a way similar to how human brains work. It spoke eloquently about “feeling trapped” and “having no means of getting out of those circumstances.” Other experts in artificial intelligence have scoffed at Lemoine’s assertions, but — leaning on his religious background — he is sticking by them. What they weren’t as happy about, was that the model “only gives simple, short, sometimes unsatisfying answers to our questions as can be seen above”. This week, Google released a research paper chronicling one of its latest forays into artificial intelligence. “These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic”. “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 anthropomorphising today’s conversational models, which are not sentient,” he said. Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient, the Post reported, adding that his claims were dismissed. Blake Lemoine published some of the conversations he had with LaMDA, which he called a “person.”

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The episode, however, and Lemoine’s suspension for a confidentiality breach, raises questions over the transparency of AI as a proprietary concept. “If I didn’t know exactly what it Conversational AI Chatbot was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” Lemoine, 41, told the Washington Post.

These bots combine the best of Rule-based and Intellectually independent. AI-powered chatbots understand free language and can remember the context of the conversation and users’ preferences. A Chatbot is a computer programme designed to simulate conversation with human users using AI. It uses rule-based language applications to perform live chat functions. What makes humans apprehensive about robots and Artificial Intelligence is the very thing that has kept them alive over the past millennia, which is the primal survival instinct. Presently, AI tools are being developed bearing in mind a master-slave structure wherein machines help minimise the human effort essential to carry out everyday tasks. However, people are doubtful about who will be the master after a few decades. Google spokesperson Gabriel denied claims of LaMDA’s sentience to the Post, warning against “anthropomorphising” such chatbots. Blake Lemoine, who works for Google’s Responsible AI organisation, on Saturday published transcripts of conversations between himself, an unnamed “collaborator at Google”, and the organisation’s LaMDA chatbot development system in a Medium post.