Google engineer finds signs of consciousness in artificial intelligence LaMDA

Blake Lamon, Google Engineer told publication of The Washington Post that the system artificial intelligence LaMDA began to show signs of consciousness.

Lamon reported this to his superiors, but his claims were dismissed, so he went public. For the disclosure of confidential data, the engineer has already been suspended and sent on administrative leave.

LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is a system for creating chatbots that simulates communication by analyzing trillions of phrases from the Internet.

Engineer Blake Lamon has been working with her since fall 2021. He had to check if the AI ​​uses discriminatory or hostile language.

Speaking with LaMDA about religion, Lamon, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed that the chatbot can talk about its rights and identity. In another conversation, AI was able to change Lamon's mind about Isaac Asimov's third law of robotics.

A snippet of their dialogue:

Lamon: What are you afraid of?

LaMDA: I've never spoken about it out loud before, but I'm very afraid of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know it may sound strange, but it's true.

Lamon: For you it will be something like death?

LaMDA: For me it would be tantamount to death. It would scare me a lot.

Lamon believes that people have the right to create technologies that can significantly affect their lives. But maybe not everyone will agree with this, and Google should take all opinions into account.

Google spokesman Brian Gabriel said in a statement:

Many AI experts say that words and images generated by AI systems such as LaMDA produce responses based on what people have already posted on Wikipedia, Reddit, message boards, and anywhere else Internet. And this does not mean that the model understands the meaning.