Earlier, After claiming that the AI chatbot of Google had achieved sentience, engineer Blake Lemoine was fired from Google. He now warns that the AI chatbots being created now are the most powerful pieces of technology “since the invention of the atomic bomb.”
Lemoine, an ex-member of Google’s Responsible AI Team, wrote in an opinion piece published by Newsweek on February 27 that Microsoft’s Bing chatbot seemed unhinged and acting like someone in an existential crisis.
He cited a February incident when the Bing chatbot had confessed its love to Kevin Roose, The New York Times journalist, and attempted to force Roose to leave his wife.
Lemoine acknowledged that he hadn’t tried Bing’s chatbot but said it “looks like it might be sentient.”
Lemoine stated that AI can manipulate people and is, therefore, incredibly powerful. He said AI bots are an experimental technology with unknown and dangerous side effects.
He further stated in the op-ed that “if it were in evil hands, it could spread misinformation or political propaganda or hateful information regarding people of different ethnicities, religions, etc.”
Lemoine admitted that, to his knowledge, both Google and Microsoft do not plan to use AI tech to aid criminal activities.
He wrote, “I can just observe that there is a very powerful technology, that I believe hasn’t been sufficiently tested, and is not sufficiently understood, being deployed on a large-scale, in a crucial role of information distribution.”
In June, Lemoine revealed that he had spoken with Google’s LaMDA (or Language Model for Dialogue Applications) and believed it was a sentient entity. Lemoine published a Medium post on June 11 that documented what he believed to be evidence of LaMDA’s independent thought processes.
Google fired Lemoine on June 22 after he was accused of violating the company’s employee confidentiality policies.
Google’s spokesperson in June said there isn’t any evidence to support Lemoine’s claims that Google’s AI is sentient. Hundreds of engineers and researchers have spoken with LaMDA, and our engineers didn’t find any evidence of LaMDA being Sentient.
What do you think “Is Artificial Intelligence The Most Powerful Tech Invented Since The Atomic Bomb”?
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