SAN FRANCISCO – Google fired one of its engineers, Blake Lemoine, on Friday, more than a month after it raised ethical concerns About how the company is testing an AI chatbot that it believes has achieved awareness.
“He has consistently chosen to violate explicit recruitment and data security policies that include the need to protect product information,” said Google spokesperson Chris Pappas, Mr.
The company, which denies that its chat software language model is sensitive, put Mr. Lemoine on paid leave in June. Mr. Lemoyne confirmed his dismissal in a text message on Friday, and said he was meeting with lawyers to review his options. The shooting was first Reported by Big Technology Newsletter.
Mr. Lemoine caused a stir last month when he was Tell The Washington Post said it believed Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, was conscious — unleashing fears that AI was approaching a dystopian science fiction movie and a tumultuous debate about whether a computer program could really have a soul. His suspension also led to conspiracy theories about whether it was part of a cover-up by Google.
For Google, it was last in line local disputes On the ethics and role of artificial intelligence, an area of technology in which the company’s future has staked.
Mr. Lemoine’s claim that LaMDA is sensitive has been criticized by the company and several other AI experts who have said these types of chatbots – software that simulate a text conversation with another human, often used for customer service – are not advanced enough to be conscious.
“If an employee shares concerns about our work, as Blake did, we review them extensively,” Mr. Pappas said. “We found Blake’s claims that LaMDA is sensitive to be completely unfounded and worked to clarify this with him for several months.”
Besides communicating his concerns to the media, Mr. Lemoine said in June he had handed over documents to an unidentified US senator, claiming they provided evidence of Google and its technology’s involvement in religious discrimination.