A GOOGLE engineer who says the tech giant has created a'sentient AI child' is now claiming it could escape and do "bad things". Engineer Blake Lemoine has been suspended by Google, which says he violated its confidentiality policies. News of Lemoine's claims broke earlier in June but the 41-year-old software expert has since suggested to Fox News that the AI could escape. In a recent interview, he described the AI as a "child" and a "person". He said: "Any child has the potential to grow up and be a bad person and do bad things."

Google has suspended one of its engineers after he claimed that one of the company's experimental artificial intelligence Bot has gained sentience. The Alphabet-run AI development team put him on paid leave for breaching company policy by sharing confidential information about the project. Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer at Google's Responsible AI organization, claimed that the company's most advanced technology, LaMDA, was sentient and had a soul. LaMDA stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. LaMDA is an internal Google Cloud system used to create chatbots that can mimic human speech.

Google has placed one of its engineers on paid administrative leave for allegedly breaking its confidentiality policies after he grew concerned that an AI chatbot system had achieved sentience, the Washington Post reports. The engineer, Blake Lemoine, works for Google's Responsible AI organization, and was testing whether its LaMDA model generates discriminatory language or hate speech. Google believes Lemoine's actions relating to his work on LaMDA have violated its confidentiality policies, The Washington Post and The Guardian report. In a June 6th Medium post, the day Lemoine was placed on administrative leave, the engineer said he sought "a minimal amount of outside consultation to help guide me in my investigations" and that the list of people he had held discussions with included US government employees. "We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven't learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them," said University of Washington professor Emily M. Bender.

A senior software engineer at Google who signed up to test Google's artificial intelligence tool called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications), has claimed that the AI robot is in fact sentient and has thoughts and feelings. During a series of conversations with LaMDA, 41-year-old Blake Lemoine presented the computer with various of scenarios through which analyses could be made. They included religious themes and whether the artificial intelligence could be goaded into using discriminatory or hateful speech. Lemoine came away with the perception that LaMDA was indeed sentient and was endowed with sensations and thoughts all of its own. Blake Lemoine, 41, a senior software engineer at Google has been testing Google's artificial intelligence tool called LaMDA'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-old kid that happens to know physics,' he told the Washington Post.