• A Google engineer was fired following a dispute about his work on an artificial intelligence robot.

• According to Blake Lemoine, there are similarities between the robot and human children.

• He told Insider he's not trying to convince the public of his claims but seeks better ethics in AI.

When Blake Lemoine worked at Google as an engineer, he was tasked with testing whether a robot the company was developing exhibited any biases.

Lemoine didn't realize that his job with the company's Responsible AI department — a division within Google Research that deals with things like accessibility, AI's use for social good, and the ethics of AI — would lead him down the avenue it did.

He made news recently for his controversial belief that the Google AI chatbot was sentient. The bot was known as LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, and Lemoine had been tasked with testing it.

After publicly releasing excerpts of conversations he'd had with the bot, which was trained to mimic speech similar to humans, Lemoine handed over documents to an unnamed US senator, claiming that Google and its technology have been involved in instances of religious discrimination.

A day later, he was suspended after Google said he had breached the company's confidentiality policy, the company confirmed to Insider, refusing to comment more on the breach.

On Friday June 22, Lemoine was fired, both he and Google confirmed. In a statement to The Washington Post, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said the company found Lemoine's claims about LaMDA were "wholly unfounded" and that he violated company guidelines, which led to his termination.

Lemoine, who is an ordained Christian mystic priest, wrote in a June 13 tweet: "My opinions about LaMDA's personhood and sentience are based on my religious beliefs."

Lemoine, who spoke to Insider before his firing, said that his philosophical conversations with the robot rivaled those he's had with leading philosophers, and that convinced him of something beyond a scientific hypothesis: that the bot is sentient.