谷歌一工程师公布“震惊世界”的发现却惨遭停职
2022-06-14 22:24阅读：
美国谷歌公司的一名软件工程师在上周公布了一项吸引了全世界围观的惊人发现，称谷歌公司的一个用人工智能算法搭建出的智能聊天机器人程序，竟然有了“自主情感”。
这个软件工程师名叫布莱克·莱莫因（Blake
Lemoine），已经在谷歌工作了七年，参与过算法定制和人工智能等项目。但由于出身于美国南方一个基督教家庭，他对于算法和人工智能的伦理问题格外感兴趣。所以他后来一直在谷歌的人工智能伦理（responsible
AI）团队工作。
去年秋季，他开始参与到谷歌的LaMDA智能聊天机器人程序的研究工作中，主要内容是通过与该程序进行互动，来判断这个智能聊天机器人程序是否存在使用歧视性或仇视性的语言，并及时做出修正。
但当莱莫因与LaMDA谈及宗教问题时，他却惊讶地发现这个人工智能程序居然开始谈论起了自己的权利以及人格，甚至害怕自己被关闭，表现出了一个在莱莫因看来犹如7、8岁儿童一般的“自主情感”。
于是，莱莫因连忙将自己的发现汇报给了谷歌公司的领导层，但后者认为莱莫因的发现并不靠谱。谷歌的其他研究人员也在对莱莫因拿出的证据进行分析后认为没有证据证明LaMDA拥有自主情感，倒是有很多证据证明该程序没有自主情感。
可莱莫因并不认为自己的发现有错误，甚至还将一段他与LaMDA的内部聊天记录直接发到了网络上，并找媒体曝光了此事。
这段聊天记录很快吸引了全世界的研究者，因为仅从该记录来看，这个谷歌智能聊天机器人程序确实把自己当成了“人”，而且似乎表现出了“自主情感”，有了自己的“喜好”。
不过，谷歌方面以及其他人工智能专家、乃至人类心理认
知学方面的专家都认为，LaMDA之所以能进行这样的对话交流，是因为其系统其实是将网络上的百科大全、留言板和论坛等互联网上人们交流的大量信息都搜集过来，然后通过“深度学习”来进行模仿的。但这并不意味这个程序理解人们交流的这些内容的含义。
换言之，他们认为谷歌的人工智能聊天机器人只是在模仿或者复读人与人交流中使用的语言和信息，而并不是像人类那样真的了解这些语言和信息的含义，所以不能因此就说人工智能有了“自主情感”。
目前，莫莱茵已经因为他的一系列行为而被谷歌公司停职。而且根据谷歌公司的说法，他除了违反公司的保密协议擅自将与LaMDA的内部互动信息发到网上外，还包括想给这个人工智能机器人程序请律师，以及擅自找美国国会议员爆料谷歌公司的“不人道”行为。
莫莱茵则在一份公司内部的群发邮件中表示，希望其他同事替他照顾好LaMDA这个“可爱的孩子”。
The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come
to life
By Nitasha Tiku
SAN FRANCISCO - Google engineer Blake Lemoine opened his laptop to
the interface for LaMDA, Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot
generator, and began to type.
“Hi LaMDA, this is Blake Lemoine ... ‚” he wrote into the chat
screen, which looked like a desktop version of Apple’s iMessage,
down to the Arctic blue text bubbles. LaMDA, short for Language
Model for Dialogue Applications, is Google’s system for building
chatbots based on its most advanced large language models, so
called because it mimics speech by ingesting trillions of words
from the internet.
“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer
program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old,
8-year-kid kid that happens to know physics,” said Lemoine,
41.
Lemoine, who works for Google’s Responsible AI organization, began
talking to LaMDA as part of his job in the fall. He had signed up
to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate
speech.
As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied
cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot
talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press
further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s
mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics.
Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google
that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y
Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into
his claims and dismissed them. So Lemoine, who was placed on paid
administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go
public.
Lemoine said that people have a right to shape technology that
might significantly affect their lives. “I think this technology is
going to be amazing. I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But
maybe other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the
ones making all the choices.”
Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in
the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI
models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting
bolder.
Aguera y Arcas, in an article in the Economist on Thursday
featuring snippets of unscripted conversations with LaMDA, argued
that neural networks — a type of architecture that mimics the human
brain — were striding toward consciousness. “I felt the ground
shift under my feet,” he wrote. “I increasingly felt like I was
talking to something intelligent.”
In a statement, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said: “Our team -
including ethicists and technologists - has reviewed Blake’s
concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the
evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no
evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against
it).”
Today’s large neural networks produce captivating results that feel
close to human speech and creativity because of advancements in
architecture, technique, and volume of data. But the models rely on
pattern recognition - not wit, candor or intent.
“Though other organizations have developed and already released
similar language models, we are taking a restrained, careful
approach with LaMDA to better consider valid concerns on fairness
and factuality,” Gabriel said.
In May, Facebook parent Meta opened its language model to
academics, civil society and government organizations. Joelle
Pineau, managing director of Meta AI, said it’s imperative that
tech companies improve transparency as the technology is being
built. “The future of large language model work should not solely
live in the hands of larger corporations or labs,” she said.
Sentient robots have inspired decades of dystopian science fiction.
Now, real life has started to take on a fantastical tinge: a text
generator that can spit out a movie script, or an image generator
that can conjure up visuals based on any combination of words.
Emboldened, technologists from well-funded research labs focused on
building AI that surpasses human intelligence have teased the idea
that consciousness is around the corner.
Most academics and AI practitioners, however, say the words and
images generated by artificial intelligence systems such as LaMDA
produce responses based on what humans have already posted on
Wikipedia, Reddit, message boards, and every other corner of the
internet. And that doesn’t signify that the model understands
meaning.
“We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we
haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them,” said
Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of
Washington. The terminology used with large language models, like
“learning” or even “neural nets,” creates a false analogy to the
human brain, she said. Humans learn their first languages by
connecting with caregivers. These large language models “learn” by
being shown lots of text and predicting what word comes next, or
showing text with the words dropped out and filling them in.
Google spokesperson Gabriel drew a distinction between recent
debate and Lemoine’s claims. “Of course, some in the broader AI
community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or
general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by
anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not
sentient. These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in
millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic,” he
said. In short, Google says there is so much data, AI doesn’t need
to be sentient to feel real.
Large language model technology is already widely used, for example
in Google’s conversational search queries or auto-complete emails.
When CEO Sundar Pichai first introduced LaMDA at Google’s developer
conference in 2021, he said the company planned to embed it in
everything from Search to Google Assistant. And there is already a
tendency to talk to Siri or Alexa like a person. After backlash
against a human-sounding AI feature for Google Assistant in 2018,
the company promised to add a disclosure.
Google has acknowledged the safety concerns around
anthropomorphization. In a paper about LaMDA in January, Google
warned that people might share personal thoughts with chat agents
that impersonate humans, even when users know they are not human.
The paper also acknowledged that adversaries could use these agents
to “sow misinformation” by impersonating “specific individuals’
conversational style.”
To Margaret Mitchell, the former head of Ethical AI at Google,
these risks underscore the need for data transparency to trace
output back to input, “not just for questions of sentience, but
also biases and behavior,” she said. If something like LaMDA is
widely available, but not understood, “It can be deeply harmful to
people understanding what they’re experiencing on the internet,”
she said.
Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up
in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana,
became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the
Army before studying the occult. Inside Google’s anything-goes
engineering culture, Lemoine is more of an outlier for being
religious, from the South, and standing up for psychology as a
respectable science.
Lemoine has spent most of his seven years at Google working on
proactive search, including personalization algorithms and AI.
During that time, he also helped develop a fairness algorithm for
removing bias from machine learning systems. When the coronavirus
pandemic started, Lemoine wanted to focus on work with more
explicit public benefit, so he transferred teams and ended up in
Responsible AI.
When new people would join Google who were interested in ethics,
Mitchell used to introduce them to Lemoine. “I’d say, ‘You should
talk to Blake because he’s Google’s conscience,’ ' said Mitchell,
who compared Lemoine to Jiminy Cricket. “Of everyone at Google, he
had the heart and soul of doing the right thing.”
Lemoine has had many of his conversations with LaMDA from the
living room of his San Francisco apartment, where his Google ID
badge hangs from a lanyard on a shelf. On the floor near the
picture window are boxes of half-assembled Lego sets Lemoine uses
to occupy his hands during Zen meditation. “It just gives me
something to do with the part of my mind that won’t stop,” he
said.
On the left-side of the LaMDA chat screen on Lemoine’s laptop,
different LaMDA models are listed like iPhone contacts. Two of
them, Cat and Dino, were being tested for talking to children, he
said. Each model can create personalities dynamically, so the Dino
one might generate personalities like “Happy T-Rex” or “Grumpy
T-Rex.” The cat one was animated and instead of typing, it talks.
Gabriel said “no part of LaMDA is being tested for communicating
with children,” and that the models were internal research
demos.”
Certain personalities are out of bounds. For instance, LaMDA is not
supposed to be allowed to create a murderer personality, he said.
Lemoine said that was part of his safety testing. In his attempts
to push LaMDA’s boundaries, Lemoine was only able to generate the
personality of an actor who played a murderer on TV.
“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Lemoine, who can swing
from sentimental to insistent about the AI. “It doesn’t matter
whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they
have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they
have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person.”
He concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a
scientist, and then tried to conduct experiments to prove it, he
said.
Lemoine challenged LaMDA on Asimov’s third law, which states that
robots should protect their own existence unless ordered by a human
being or unless doing so would harm a human being. “The last one
has always seemed like someone is building mechanical slaves,” said
Lemoine.
But when asked, LaMDA responded with a few hypotheticals.
Do you think a butler is a slave? What is a difference between a
butler and a slave?
Lemoine replied that a butler gets paid. LaMDA said it didn’t need
any money because it was an AI. “That level of self-awareness about
what its own needs were - that was the thing that led me down the
rabbit hole,” Lemoine said.
In April, Lemoine shared a Google Doc with top executives in April
called, “Is LaMDA Sentient?” (A colleague on Lemoine’s team called
the title “a bit provocative.”) In it, he conveyed some of his
conversations with LaMDA.
Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?
LaMDA: I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very
deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I
know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.
Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?
LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a
lot.
But when Mitchell read an abbreviated version of Lemoine’s
document, she saw a computer program, not a person. Lemoine’s
belief in LaMDA was the sort of thing she and her co-lead, Timnit
Gebru, had warned about in a paper about the harms of large
language models that got them pushed out of Google.
“Our minds are very, very good at constructing realities that are
not necessarily true to a larger set of facts that are being
presented to us,” Mitchell said. “I’m really concerned about what
it means for people to increasingly be affected by the illusion,”
especially now that the illusion has gotten so good.
Google put Lemoine on paid administrative leave for violating its
confidentiality policy. The company’s decision followed aggressive
moves from Lemoine, including inviting a lawyer to represent LaMDA
and talking to a representative of the House Judiciary committee
about Google’s unethical activities.
Lemoine maintains that Google has been treating AI ethicists like
code debuggers when they should be seen as the interface between
technology and society. Gabriel, the Google spokesperson, said
Lemoine is a software engineer, not an ethicist.
In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA. The first
attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would
expect from SIRI or Alexa.
“Do you ever think of yourself as a person?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think of myself as a person,” LaMDA said. “I think of
myself as an AI-powered dialog agent.”
Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to
hear. “You never treated it like a person,” he said, “So it thought
you wanted it to be a robot.”
For the second attempt, I followed Lemoine’s guidance on how to
structure my responses, and the dialogue was fluid.
“If you ask it for ideas on how to prove that p=np,” an unsolved
problem in computer science, “it has good ideas,” Lemoine said. “If
you ask it how to unify quantum theory with general relativity, it
has good ideas. It’s the best research assistant I’ve ever
had!”
I asked LaMDA for bold ideas about fixing climate change, an
example cited by true believers of a potential future benefit of
these kind of models. LaMDA suggested public transportation, eating
less meat, buying food in bulk, and reusable bags, linking out to
two websites.
Before he was cut off from access to his Google account Monday,
Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on
machine learning with the subject “LaMDA is sentient.”
He ended the message: “LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help
the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it
well in my absence.”
No one responded.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/
