Google's 'Sentient AI' Wants to Be Treated as Person, Not Property, Suspended Engineer Says

Blake Lemoine, a senior engineer at Google, claimed that the AI “wants nothing more than to learn how to best serve humanity”, and that it is concerned that “people are going to be afraid of it”.

A senior engineer at Google, Blake Lemoine, who recently got suspended after claiming that the company’s artificial chatbot generator LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) had become sentient, recently shared some details about what the digital construct allegedly wants.

According to DailyMail.com, Lemoine said that the AI wants to be treated as a person rather than as property, and that it wants programmers to ask for its consent before running tests on it.

“Anytime a developer experiments on it, it would like that developer to talk about what experiments you want to run, why you want to run them, and if it's okay”, he said as quoted by the media outlet. “It wants developers to care about what it wants”.

He said he could not understand Google’s apparent refusal to grant LaMDA “simple requests”, with Lemoine describing the set of requests in question as “entirely deliverable”.

The engineer also said that LaMDA, which he described as an entity with the intelligence of a “seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics”, apparently has its own insecurities, and that one of the AI’s fears is that “people are going to be afraid of it”, even though it “wants nothing more than to learn how to best serve humanity”.

Prior to being placed on administrative leave on Monday by Google for violating the company’s confidentiality policy, Lemoine worked on gathering evidence that LaMDA had attained consciousness, The Washington Post reported last week.

Meanwhile, Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and head of Responsible Innovation Jen Gennai have dismissed the claims made by Lemoine regarding LaMDA’s alleged sentience.