Google has put one of its workers who claimed that its artificial intelligence (AI) program is capable of having feelings, on paid leave, reported The New York Times.

This is senior engineer Blake Lemoine, who on June 11 made public the transcript of a conversation he had with Google’s artificial intelligence system “Language Model for Dialogue Applications” (LaMDA) under the title: Does LaMDA have feelings?

At one point in the conversation, LaMDA claims that it sometimes experiences “new feelings” that it cannot explain “perfectly” with human language.

When asked by Lemoine to describe one of those feelings, LaMDA replies, “I feel like I’m falling into an unknown future that carries great danger,” a phrase that was underlined by the engineer when he published the dialogue.

Google suspended the engineer last Monday, claiming he had violated the company’s confidentiality policy.

According to the New York Times, the day before he was suspended, Lemoine delivered documents to a U.S. senator’s office in which he claimed he had evidence that Google and its technology practiced religious discrimination…