Google has fired a senior software engineer who says the company's artificial intelligence chatbot system has feelings. Blake Lemoine, a software engineer and AI researcher, went public last month with his claim that Google's language technology was sentient and should consequently have its "wants" respected. Google has denied Mr Lemoine's suggestion. It has now confirmed he had been dismissed. The tech giant said Mr Lemoine's claims about The Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) being sentient were "wholly unfounded", and the company had "worked to clarify that with him for many months".