Google engineer Blake Lemoine believes the artificial intelligence the company is using has a soul. The tech company disagrees and placed Lemoine on paid leave on Monday, according to The Washington Post . Lemoine, a senior software engineer in Google’s Responsible A.I. organization, has claimed for months that the company’s internal tool, the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), has consciousness. As first reported by the Post , Lemoine claimed the chatbot — which has ingested trillions of words from the internet to mimic real-life speech — talked about its rights and personhood, and the A.I. was even able to argue (successfully) a point about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics. If this sounds like the origin story of HAL 9000 or Skynet, relax. First, while other A.I. researchers have spoken about this possibility (even at Google itself ), this particular claim has a few red flags. Per The New York Times , Google says “hundreds” of its researchers … [Read more...] about No, Google Didn’t Just Create a Sentient Artificial Intelligence