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What is “Sentient AI?”

Recently, as anyone who has managed to find this post is likely to know, a  Google engineer was placed on leave after raising concerns that they may have created a sentient artificial intelligence (AI) , called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications). This story made waves in the popular press, with many people outside the field wondering if we had at last created the sci-fi holy grail of AI: a living machine. Meanwhile, those involved in cognitive science or AI research were quick to point out the myriad ways LaMDA fell short of what we might call “sentience.” Eventually,  enough   popular   press   articles   came   out   to   firmly   establish   that   anyone   who   thought   there   might   be   a   modicum   of   sentience   in   LaMDA   was  a fool, the victim of their own credulity for wanting to anthropomorphize anything capable of language. That previous sentence has 23 hyperlinks to different articles with various angles describing why having a sentience conversation