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Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

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Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#2

Post by cgrealy »

Non pay-walled article at the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en...

and the transcript of the interview: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...

I am deeply sceptical that we have anything approaching a sentient AI, but if that transcript is not just a complete fabrication, it's still really impressive.

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#3

Post by paulpauper »

wow...they are sure strict about confidentiality

Google suspended an engineer who contended that an artificial-intelligence chatbot the company developed had become sentient, telling him that he had violated the company’s confidentiality policy after it dismissed his claims.

I wonder if this is why there are so few tech engineers as podcast guests, compared to other professions, like health, nutrition, politics, law, or physics/math.

Too bad they cannot invent an AI smart enough to solve the YouTube crypto livestream scam problem.

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#4

Post by Planktonne »

This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we want to, and because 'can feel meaningful to talk to' is not the same as 'thinks'.

It's not a bad trait for humans to have - I'd argue that our ability to find patterns that aren't there is at the core of creativity - but it's something an engineer working on such systems should be aware of and accommodate for. Magicians don't believe their own card tricks are real sorcery.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#6

Post by abetusk »

Planktonne wrote: post #4

This isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we…

Uh, you might well be right but you should really read the transcript before you jump to that conclusion [0].

I have no idea whether this is true or not but if anyone in the world has the compute capacity to create a compute system to rival a human brain (or 10000x that of a human brain), Google would be it.

[0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#7

Post by culpable_pickle »

paulpauper wrote: post #3

wow...they are sure strict about confidentiality Google suspended an engineer who contended that an artificial-intelligence chatbot the company developed had become sentient, telling him that he had violated the company’s confidentiality policy after it dismissed his claims. I wonder if this is why there are so few tech engineers as podcast guests, compared to other professions, like health, nutrition, politics, law,…

> wow...they are sure strict about confidentiality

he really did kinda go all out with it

https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/may-be-fired-soon-for-doi...

> With the assistance of outside consultation (including Meg Mitchell) I was able to run the relevant experiments and gather the necessary evidence to merit escalation.

> In an effort to be fully transparent with Google and help them contain any potential leaks of proprietary information, I myself provided a full list of the names of the people outside of Google with whom I had discussed the topic. Several of these people work for the United States government and indicated that their organization was interested in exerting federal oversight of the project due to THEIR safety concerns.

He talked widely about material, non-public research, and "With the assistance of outside consultation" reads as maybe even providing access to that material, non-public research to third parties, including fired ex-employees.

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#8

Post by fwip »

2xpress wrote: post #5

A transcript of an "interview" with this AI system is at https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...

In this article they are careful to explain that they did not meaningfully edit the AI's responses, but they leave out the fact that they deleted responses where the AI would "go on a tangent."

Re: Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person

#9

Post by fwip »

cgrealy wrote: post #2

Non pay-walled article at the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en... and the transcript of the interview: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte... I am deeply sceptical that we have anything approaching a sentient AI, but if that transcript is not just a complete fabrication, it's still really impressive.

It's really not much better than the stuff you get out of AI dungeon, especially considering that the author cherry-picked questions and answers to serve their narrative.
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