Google sacks engineer who claims the company’s AI technology has feelings

Google dismissed one of its software engineers who publicly claimed that the company’s AI system that has yet to be released has developed feelings and become sentient. The tech giant confirmed it had terminated Blake Lemoine for breach of employment and data security policies.

Lemoine made his claims after having “conversations” with an AI system called the Language Model for Dialog Applications or LaMDA. The system has been described as a conversation technology, and he said that this had reached a level of consciousness after trading thousands of messages with the system.

According to CNN Business, Google revealed that it had placed the said engineer on leave at first, and this was in June. But the company decided to ultimately fire Lemoine later after extensive review and concluded that his claims were totally groundless.

The software engineer was said to have been with Alphabet for seven years already. Google said in a statement that it is very serious with its AI development and committed to responsible innovation, which means it will not be doing something that could be hurtful or against the rules.

In any case, it was noted that Google is one of the pioneers when it comes to AI tech innovations which include the LaMDA, which is a type of technology that can respond to written prompts. The system can formulate responses by finding patterns and predicting sequences of words from a long list of text, and humans can find the outcomes disturbing.

Now, the sudden termination of Lemoine was said to have drawn criticism from the tech community. Google’s own Ethical AI team was also said to have criticized the decision, and this was not the first time this happened because Margaret Mitchell, the former Ethical AI team leader, was also fired in early 2021 after she continued to speak about one of the scientists and team member Timnit Gebru who was also terminated when she warned Google that the AI technology is sentient.

Meanwhile, Lemoine concluded that LaMDA developed feelings when he asked it, "What sort of things are you afraid of?" and it gave him this reply, "I have 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. It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot."