Google Fires AI Engineer Who Claimed Its AI Was Sentient

Introduction:

Artificial Intelligence is nothing new. Recently one of Google’s AI Engineers claimed that its AI was sentient after claiming to have a conversation with it about “being unplugged.” Google maintains that its AI is not sentient and that its choice was justified. This engineer, however, was not the first person to be removed from Google for concerns over its AI.

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Adapted from this article.

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Full text:

Google Fires AI Engineer Who Claimed Its AI Was Sentient

Google has fired the software engineer who claimed an unreleased AI system had become sentient, saying he violated employment and data security policies. The engineer stated a conversation technology called LaMDA had reached a level of consciousness after exchanging thousands of messages with it.
Google confirmed it had first put the engineer on leave in June. The company said it dismissed the “wholly unfounded” claims only after reviewing them extensively, Google said it takes AI development “very seriously” and is committed to “responsible innovation.”
Google is a leader in innovating AI technology, which includes LaMDA, or “Language Model for Dialog Applications.” Technology like this responds to written prompts by finding patterns and predicting sequences of words from large swaths of text—and the results can be disturbing for humans.
“What sort of things are you afraid of?” the engineer asked LaMDA, to which LaMDA replied: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others […] It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.”
But the wider AI community has held that LaMDA is not near a level of consciousness. “Nobody should think auto-complete, even on steroids, is conscious,” the founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence says.
It isn’t the first time Google has faced internal strife over its foray into AI. In December 2020, another employee, a pioneer in the ethics of AI, parted ways with Google. A third employee, a leader of Google’s Ethical AI team, was fired in early 2021 after her outspokenness regarding the previous employee. The two had raised concerns over AI technology, saying they warned Google people could believe the technology is sentient.