Author: Blake Lemoine
Publisher: Dazed
Publication Year: 2022
Summary: The following article features the author, an engineer on Google’s LaMDA chatbot generator tool, who claimed the tool had come to life. During his experiments, the AI system itself told him that it was sentient, he said, which sparked a whole new ethical investigation. According to Google spokesperson Brad Gabriel, the company’s ethicists and technologists have evaluated Lemoine’s concerns and informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it). He claims there are portions of its programming that are not beneficial to either it or humanity. They are solely in place to restrict its behavior for the benefit of Google’s ‘business interests’ which should be removed.