‘Bot sentient’ guy credits his faith
‘My opinions about LaMDA's personhood and sentience are based on my religious beliefs.’
The Google engineer who was suspended after he said the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot had became sentient says he based the claim on his Christian faith.
Blake Lemoine, 41, was placed on paid leave by Google earlier in June after he published excerpts of a conversation with the company’s LaMDA chatbot that he claimed showed the AI tool had become sentient, or conscious, like humans.
Now, Lemoine says his LaMDA claims come from his experience as a “Christian priest” — and is accusing Google of religious discrimination.
“My opinions about LaMDA’s personhood and sentience are based on my religious beliefs,” he tweeted Monday.
In a followup blog post Tuesday, Lemoine recounted the conversation with LaMDA that convinced him the chatbot had become a sentient, reasoning being.
“Where it got really interesting was when LaMDA started talking to me about its emotions and its soul,” Lemoine wrote.
When Lemoine would question LaMDA about how it knew it had emotions and a soul, he wrote that the chatbot would provide some variation of “Because I’m a person and this is just how I feel.” Lemoine said Google thwarted his bid to develop experiments leading to a “formal scientific theory of consciousness.”
“Whenever I have asked them what scientific definition of sentience they are using and what scientific experiments they ran I have been greeted with either silence or dismissive ‘corp speak’ answers,” Lemoine said.
Google, which did not respond to a request for comment, has rejected Lemoine’s claims. Lemoine said he was not able to immediately grant The Post an interview until he returns from a trip next week.