Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I'm definitely taking Blake Lemoine's claim with a grain of salt. The Google engineer "described the system he has been working on since last fall as sentient, with a perception of, and ability to express thoughts and feelings that was equivalent to a human child." OK, maybe not. Judge for yourself. But what's more concerning here is Google's reaction after he released a transcript of the conversations. "Google said it suspended Lemoine for breaching confidentiality policies by publishing the conversations with LaMDA online, and said in a statement that he was employed as a software engineer, not an ethicist." In other words, says Ton Zijlstra, "the engineer should not worry about ethics, they've got ethicists on the payroll for that. Worrying about ethics is not the engineer's job."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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Last Updated: Apr 25, 2024 4:12 p.m.

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