Blake Lemoine was suspended from his position as a google Engineer after claiming that the company’s LaMDA chatbot is “as sentient as any child.”
The AI researcher tried to help LaMDA find a lawyer, and after finding one, the law professional called it quits after being “scared off” by the case.
However, the story only gets more fascinating. Lemoine revealed even more details about the AI during an interview with Fox News, as he claimed that “LaMDA could escape from its software prison and do bad things.”
This is not all. Lemoine’s claims became even more incredible as he continued describing the AI as another human that is of our society.
Lemoine continued by saying that the AI is a “child” and that “any child has the potential to grow up and be a bad person and do bad things.”
The man argued that the “AI is a person,” and “any person has the ability to escape the control of other people, that’s just the situation we all live on a daily basis,” suggesting that an advanced AI like LaMDA could be able to “break free” from Google’s “digital prison” in the near future.
Although these claims seem to be taken straight out of a Sci-Fi movie, Lemoine admitted that he might not know the whole context behind the situation.
The intentions of the researcher while revealing these claims are still unknown. Does he want to warn us about LaMDA, or is he trying to prove something different?
The story has sparked a debate on the capabilities of modern AI language models and whether AI could deserve legal representation. Lemoine’s claims quickly became viral on social media as many internet users discussed the topic from different perspectives.
After digging into Lemoine’s personal history, we may have a few clues behind his intentions. For instance, he “became ordained as a mystic Christian priest,” WaPo reported. Allegedly, he also studied the occult for several years.
This whole AI controversy has taken several turns in little time. Maybe it would be best if we believed that Lemoine is nothing more than a scientist having problems distinguishing an AI chatbot from an actual human being. The story doesn’t become less captivating by this fact, however.
The Washington Post reported that the AI researched has been put on administrative leave by Google after violating the company’s confidentiality.
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