Google suspends engineer who claimed LaMDA had become sentient

Google placed Blake Lemoine, an engineer in its Responsible AI group, on paid leave after he argued that the LaMDA dialogue system was a person with rights and published his conversations with it. Google said ethicists and technologists had reviewed his claims and found no evidence of sentience, explaining that such systems imitate patterns in human conversation. Most AI experts agreed current technology lacks self-awareness. The episode showed how readily people attribute minds to fluent conversational machines, a central concern for anyone designing social robots.

Source: SiliconANGLE