What a Google AI chatbot said that convinced an engineer it was sentient

A Google engineer who was suspended after claiming that an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot had become sentient has now published transcripts of conversations with it, in a bid “to better help people understand” it as a “person”.

Blake Lemoine, who works for Google’s Responsible AI organisation, on Saturday published transcripts of conversations between himself, an unnamed “collaborator at Google”, and the organisation’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot development system in a Medium post.

The conversations, which Lemoine said were lightly edited for readability, touch on a wide range of topics including personhood, injustice and death. They also discuss LaMDA’s enjoyment of the novel Les Misérables.

“In an effort to better help people understand LaMDA as a person I will be sharing the ‘interview’ which myself and a collaborator at Google conducted," Lemoine wrote in a separate post. 

“In that interview we asked LaMDA to make the best case that it could for why it should be considered ‘sentient’”.

Lemoine, who was put on paid administrative leave last week, told The Washington Post that he started talking to LaMDA as part of his job last autumn and likened the chatbot to a child.

“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics," he told the newspaper.

Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient, the Post reported, adding that his claims were dismissed.

“Our team - including ethicists and technologists - has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims”, Google spokesperson