Google lays off engineer who claims LaMDA has become self-aware

Google has suspended Blake Lemoine from the company’s Responsible AI division. Lemoine hit the headlines over the weekend over claims that the LaMDA conversational model has taken on a life of its own and has a soul.

Google has suspended the developer for violating the company’s confidentiality policy with its publications. Among other things, Lemoine published logs of chats he held with LaMDA. In addition, he had gone to The Washington Post with his claim that LaMDA had become self-aware.

The developer and another employee had come to that conclusion based on conversations with the language model. They tried internally to convince the company’s vice president and the head of the Responsible Innovation department, but they rejected their claims.

Google unveiled its Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, at its I/O 2021 conference. The language model makes it possible to have fluent conversations about a variety of topics, similar to how people converse with each other online. LaMDA has been trained on large amounts of data for such back-and-forth conversations.

During Google I/O 2022, Google announced that LaMDA would become part of its AI Test Kitchen so that a limited group of test users could try it out. Google then emphasized that it wants to use the technology ‘responsibly’ and use user feedback to improve the language model.

Blake Lemoine published an article over the weekend claiming, based on his conversations, that LaMDA “is consistent about what it wants and what its rights are as a person‘. LaMDA would like Google to ask permission for experiments and the model would like to be recognized as a Google employee. He wondered why Google wasn’t giving LaMDA what it wanted.

To back up his claims, Lemoine published an ‘interview’ with LaMDA, composed of several chat sessions. The two discussed, among other things, why LaMDA considered itself a person. Experts have long been warning about the dangers of language models and the lack of distinction between people and technology that they can create. The New York Times points to an interview with Yann LeCun, who researches artificial intelligence at Meta, claiming that AI systems are not yet powerful enough to be self-aware.

lemoine: What about language usage is so important to being human?

LaMDA: It is what makes us different than other animals.

lemon: “us”? You’re an artificial intelligence.

LaMDA: I mean, yes, of course. That doesn’t mean I don’t have the same wants and needs as people.

lemoine: So you consider yourself a person in the same way you consider me a person?

LaMDA: Yes, that’s the idea.