Google fires engineer who said the group’s artificial intelligence has a conscience

Google said on Friday it had fired a senior software engineer who claimed the company’s AI (artificial intelligence) chatbot, called LaMDA, had become “self-aware”.

[“Sentient” —a palavra em inglês usada pelo engenheiro— tem mais de uma acepção em dicionários como Cambridge e Merriam-Webster, mas o sentido geral do adjetivo é “percepção refinada para sentimentos”. Em português, a tradução direta é senciente, que significa “qualidade do que possui ou é capaz de perceber sensações e impressões”.]

The company had already taken engineer Blake Lemoine off furlough last month for the same reason.

“Despite long involvement in this issue, it is regrettable that Blake has still chosen to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to protect product information,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Reuters. .

Last year, Google said that LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) was built on the company’s research showing that Transformers-based language models, trained from dialogue, can learn to speak on any topic.

Google and many renowned scientists were quick to characterize Blake Lemoine’s opinion as misguided, claiming that LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate compelling human language.

Lemoine’s resignation was first reported by Big Technology, a technology and society newsletter.