Google engineer Blake Lemoine tried to convince fellow Google employees that the company's LaMDA language model was sentient.

Per a June 2022 Washington Post report, Lemoine, an ordained Christian mystical priest 'was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt 'When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that.'

Google, technology professionals, philsophers and ethicists responded to the notion that LaMDA - and other technologies - can be human primarily on technical, scientific grounds, prompting Lemoine to complain the model faces 'bigotry' in an interview with WIRED.

Google suspended and fired Lemoine after he breached company policy by sharing information about his project, recruited a lawyer for the AI after claiming that LaMDA had asked him to do so, and alleged that Google was discriminating against him because of his religion.