Explained | Did Google Make AI Sentient, Or Was The Senior Google Engineer Tricked By His Own Product?

Lemoine had claimed that the system for developing chatbots he was working on had become sentient and went on to add that the AI system has gained the ability to express thoughts and feelings.

Lemoine had published the transcripts of the conversations between Google’s AI model. Image: Getty

Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) be sentient? Well, yes, according to Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer at Google's AI development team who recently received a lot of backlash for the claim and was also suspended by the company. Lemoine had claimed that the system for developing chatbots he was working on had become sentient and went on to add that the AI system has gained the ability to express thoughts and feelings equivalent to that of a six or seven-year-old child.

Did AI really "become" sentient?

To back his claims, Lemoine had published the transcripts of the conversations between Google’s AI model, named Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) and himself. However, the lengthy and eyebrow-raising transcript of the conversations was "highly edited", claims a report by The Washington Post. Even though the Google engineer mentioned that the AI chatbot had convinced him that it was sentient, the documents obtained by the publication say that the conversations were rearranged. Lemoine had also told the publication that he spoke to the AI chatbot about religion and law.

As per the chat logs in the Washington Post report, there are disclaimers from Lemoine and an unnamed collaborator that read: “This document was edited with readability and narrative coherence in mind.”

Based on the transcripts of LaMDA, American scientist Melanie Mitchell who is also the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, and the author of “Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans” was quoted as saying by MSNBC: "I do not believe it is sentient, by any reasonable meaning of that term. And the reason is because I understand pretty well how the system works; I know what it's been exposed to, in terms of its training, I know how it processes language. It's very fluent, as are all these very large language systems that we've seen recently. But it has no connection to the world, besides the language that it's been processing that it's been trained on.

What is Google's AI model LaMDA?

LaMDA or Language Model for Dialogue Applications is the tech behemoth's latest AI chatbot. During last year's annual Google I/O 2021 event, company CEO Sundar Pichai revealed the company’s “latest breakthrough in natural language understanding” that was named LaMDA.