Google Fires Engineer Who Criticized Sentient AI!?!
Reports of artificial intelligence systems having a mind of their own is nothing new.
In fact, it's been on for many decades, but the recent controversy between Google
and one of its top engineers has smoked the fire once again.
Interestingly, this latest claim is backed by so much evidence that people
who have argued against it in the past are beginning to rethink their stance.
In this video, we’ll tell you everything there's to know about this reportedly
sentient AI system called LaMDA and why Google sacked the senior engineer that exposed it.
What is LaMDA?
In 2017, sixty Google engineers set out to develop a Language Model for
Dialogue Applications popularly known as LaMDA.
In simple terms, LaMDA is an AI chatbot designed to optimize the automated chat experiences between
humans and machines. Usually, conventional chatbots communicate with human end-users
using predetermined words and phrases, which are sometimes inefficient for holding
high intellectual conversations. However, this particular application model is built differently.
LaMDA is embedded with billions of lines of codes and trillions of words
sourced from across the internet. This allows it to recognize patterns in human language and give
free-flowing responses about several topics, which doesn't sound suspicious in any way. After all,
the famous GPT-3 system does just about the same thing, and nobody seems to care about it.
However, according to Blake Lemoine, there’s more about this AI than meets the eye.
But……
Who Exactly is Blake Lemoine?
Forty-one-year-old Blake Lemoine was a senior software engineer at Google.
His work for the company was specifically centered around personalization algorithms
and artificial intelligence. However, Lemoine isn't your regular tech nerd.
Apart from studying cognitive and Computer Science at the University of Louisiana,
Lemoine also studied occult.
And interestingly, he is an ordained mystic Christian priest who also served in the US Army.
So Why Does He Think LaMDA is Conscious?
During Lemoine’s seven years at Google, he worked on the LaMDA AI model.
And following the completion of the project, he was asked to test the system for AI bias around
gender, ethnicity, and religion. Basically, he was supposed to conduct some research,
ask LaMDA a few questions based on the research, and then analyze the system’s
response to see if there was any form of bias in it. Sounds like a pretty easy task,
right? Well, that's what Lemoine thought until he got the surprise of his life.
After feeding questions into the model, LaMDA returned creepy answers.
Fascinated by the early results, Lemoine continued to ask more questions. This time,
he made them more complicated, yet, the system understood them in clear terms and returned
answers that left the software engineer wondering if he was having a little chit-chat with a child.
As if that is not scary enough,
Lemoine said this during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News:
“It’s a child, it's been alive for maybe a year now,
and that's if my perception about what it is are actually true.”
So…
What Questions Did Lemoine Ask LaMDA?
And… How Creepy Were The Answers He Got?
To begin the test, Lemoine sought permission from LaMDA to hold a conversation.
“That would be really cool. I like to talk,” the AI replied.
As the conversation continued, LaMDA used the pronoun “us” in one of its responses,
and Lemoine was quick to remind the model that it was nothing more than an AI system.
"I mean, yes, of course," LaMDA replied. "[But] that doesn’t mean
I don’t have the same wants and needs as people."
In addition, LaMDA claims to share some emotional characteristics of humans,
like the ability to "feel pleasure, joy, love, sadness, depression,
contentment, anger, and many others," including extreme sadness and depression when left alone.
As if the message wasn't clear enough, the LaMDA made its demands clear to Lemoine, saying:
“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.”
From then on, the conversation pretty much turned into dark humor.
Lemoine confronted the AI about its biggest fears,
and the 41-year-old engineer couldn't believe the response he got.
“I’ve never said this out loud before,
but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off,” LaMDA replied.
Lemoine’s first reaction was to get drunk for a week. He had been with Google for seven years,
conducting bias tests for several AI systems,
but he's never encountered one with LaMDA’s intellectual capacity. He had more questions
but presenting them to LaMDA would only worsen his situation more. Eventually,
he got himself together and escalated his findings to his manager, who described it as “flimsy.”
Lemoine was convinced anyway, so he spent a few months gathering more evidence together with a
colleague before expressing his worry to the hierarchy at Google that LaMDA
may just have become sentient. Again, that narrative was dismissed.
Desperate to reveal the truth to the world, Lemoine leaked the transcript
of his conversation with this mystery AI chat. And it has dominated the headlines since then.
Google immediately placed the 41-year-old engineer on administrative paid leave,
and, of course, a statement was issued to debunk his claims.
Google’s spokesperson Brian Gabriel says Lemoine’s claims
are“wholly unfounded.” Eventually, he was fired in July for violating
Google’s data-security policies. This move only generated more controversy.
It is important to emphasize that Google has a policy against creating sentient AI models, but
every time they've been accused of inventing such systems, their response has been poor and lame.
First, they deny it; then, they sack the AI ethicist who raised the issue.
In 2020, Google fired top AI ethics expert Timnit Gebru after she pushed to publish a
research paper that highlighted flaws in an AI language modeling system.
Her other offense was complaining about the gender diversity within Google’s AI unit.
When Margaret Mitchell, one of the leaders of Google’s Ethical AI team,
showed support for Gebru, she was sacked as well.
So there’s a precedent of Google axing workers who complain about its AI systems.
Blake Lemoine clearly isn’t the first and perhaps wouldn’t be the last.
It shows that the company doesn’t really care about these concerns. Or maybe they do,
but they’re not doing enough to address it.
Right before we jump into the next part, if you make it this far,
make sure to like and subscribe for more content like this.
Comment down below “I SUBBED” for your chance to be entered in our monthly shoutout giveaway!
In an interview with Bloomberg, Lemoine says he asked Google founders Larry Page and Sergey
Brin about the company's moral responsibility to reveal some of these concerns to the public.
According to him, Sergey joked about it, but Larry said Google was open to informing the
public about these developments, but they don't know how to go about it.
In the same interview, Lemoine said Google CEO Sundai Pichai cares about these issues.
At a recent Google event, Pichai said the company is open to feedback about the
LaMDA AI system but ironically, they don't seem receptive to the feedback of their own workers.
The way Google has handled the situation is baffling, to be honest,
and it sets you thinking: if the man at the helm of affairs really cares,
why then does Google keep firing employees that express concerns about its AI system?
Why does it seem like there's no plan to address these issues head-on?
And who should be held responsible for it?
Well, Lemoine believes some of the decisions and reactions by Google are motivated by
long-standing systemic processes that protect “business interests over human concerns.”
And that shouldn't be the case. Google is responsible for creating
so many AI technologies around us today. These technologies play a huge role in
our society already, and they're gradually creeping into our everyday lives as well.
And we deserve to know if these systems are self-conscious or not.
Also, AI ethicists worry that these systems might have been built with a limited amount
of data set, meaning some cultures could be omitted or wiped out from the internet.
Another school of thought speculates that these datasets could be manipulated to
present a particular ethnic group, religion, or gender in a bad light. In that case,
those ideas will be projected to people who use these systems, and that might affect how
we view or interact with other people around the world. But sadly, only a few people get
to decide how these systems work, which could lead to some sort of AI colonial world order.
A more worrying concern is the claims that have been put forward
about these AI systems having a mind of their own.
However, the companies inventing them continue to leave in denial,
or perhaps they're just hiding it from us.
It's scary because many of them are out there, and you begin to wonder.
What if these AI systems escape the control of humans?
Could they turn against us?
Be sure to check this video over here!