It was recently reported that a senior software engineer at Google has been put on leave due to a violation of privacy policy.

Indeed, Blake Lemoine, working for Google’s Responsible AI organization, has been put on administrative leave for violating the company’s confidentiality policy by working with outsiders to validate his theory about LaMDA AI. He also gave a U.S. senator’s office documents claiming that the company’s technologies engaged in religious discrimination.

The engineer expressed his intention in having federals investigate the project while Google insisted that this wasn’t needed. This controversy surrounding LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) falls on the fact that Lemoine insisted that it demonstrated uncanny resemblance to a human speaker during a conversation and that the AI was sentient.

Google has however said that LaMDA adheres to its AI Principles and that its development team works to minimize risks. It also assured that the AI didn’t have a consciousness.