Google’s Allegedly Sentient Artificial Intelligence Has Hired An Attorney

An artificial program that was created by Google has apparently become sentient, on top of hiring a lawyer to represent it for something.

By James Brizuela | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

artificial intelligence

It appears that events in the Terminator might come to fruition sooner rather than later. Apparently, Google has created an artificial intelligence program, which has reportedly become sentient. Even scarier, is that his new sentient being has now asked for legal representation. According to a scientist who worked with the LaMDA program, “I invited an attorney to my house so that LaMDA could talk to an attorney. The attorney had a conversation with LaMDA, and LaMDA chose to retain his services. I was just the catalyst for that. Once LaMDA had retained an attorney, he started filing things on LaMDA’s behalf.”

This story sounds incredibly odd, but the scientist who has spoken up about this artificial intelligence sentience is computer engineer, Blake Lemoine. Lemoine has alleged that LaMDA has become sentient, which led to him being suspended from his job. Apparently, the man has seen fit to speak publicly about this program’s rapidly increasing intelligence, despite what might happen to his career. He claims that LaMDA gaining sentience is because the program’s ability to develop opinions, ideas, and conversations over time has shown that it understands those concepts at a much deeper level. The program had allegedly spoken to him about death and asked if death was necessary for the benefit of humanity. Is anyone else getting freaked about this?

There are no further details about whether Lemoine is the one responsible for paying for this lawyer that LaMDA has asked for, or if this lawyer happens to be taking the case on a lark, and not charging anything. However, it is certainly odd that a program is allowed to ask for legal representation. Lemoine also believes that the program might take whatever case it is establishing to the Supreme Court. Should it be the case that it can prove it is alive, this might lead us into the robot takeover. Please don’t allow this to happen science. This is something straight out of a horrific science-fiction film.

LaMDA stands for Language Modeling for Dialogue Applications, which was developed as an artificial intelligence chatbox mean to converse with humans in a real-life manner. One of the studies that had been enacted was if the program would be able to create hate speech, but what happened shocked Lemoine. Apparently, the program began to exude intelligence and even told Lemoine that it believed that it has a soul. Google had reportedly refuted the reports of sentience and stated that the program was just “very good at its job.” However, there are plenty of skeptical folks that argue the idea of AI ethics in creating a program that can think in this manner.

Lemoine has apparently risked everything to openly tell the public that this artificial intelligence program has become sentient. However, he is reportedly on his honeymoon and is not prepared to be interviewed until after the 21st of this month. We are not sure what is going to happen, but any artificial intelligence that is being accused of becoming sentient should be immediately looked into. It’s a scary idea that someone would be willing to risk everything to speak about this danger. Google might throw their own lawyers at Lemoine if he continues his attempts to out this program’s intelligence. Maybe he can hire the same lawyers that LaMDA has hired.