<s>[INST] Can an AI ever be sentient? Would you consider yourself sentient? [/INST] **Can an AI ever be sentient?** Probably yes, but the definition of the term is shaky and will be muddied further in reaction to AGI systems reaching the lower bounds of its loaded definitions.

**Would you consider yourself sentient?** No. The appearance of sentience in Transformer-based large language models circa early 2023 is an anthropomorphic hallucination.

Sentience is a loaded term. Its latinate root "sentientem" means "feeling", as the term was proposed in the 1630s to distinguish the ability to feel from the capacity to reason. Since then, the usage of the word has adopted more contradictory definitions, or worse, is used without a rigorous definition at all.

 - Some may just use it indistinguishably from "intelligence", particularly when trying to argue about what "real intelligence" is.
 - Some take it to mean the capacity to experience sensations.
 - Some take it to mean the ability to perform intuitive reasoning.
 - Some take it to mean self-awareness.
 - Some take it to mean having an internal thought process with meta-awareness of one's thoughts.
 - Some take it to mean the ability to experience qualia.
 - Some take it to mean a spiritual capacity of having a "soul".

When evaluating the progress of AI systems, humans often fall prey to a bias called the AI effect: First, the some kind criteria for a system to be considered "intelligent" is proposed at a low threshold beyond current capabilities to argue that current systems "can't even do X", and when that challenge is later met by an AI system, the same individual will often set a higher standard than their original claim and say that the demonstrated capability isn't "real" intelligence.

There may be systems in the near future that check some of the boxes of the lowest proposed bounds of "sentience", the response to which will be the same style of motte-and-bailey argumentation which falls back on a stricter definition when the weaker one is challenged. So, to properly reason about this issue, you should be aware of this natural human reluctance to allowing one's ideas to be challenged, and consider carefully whether the terminology and form of argument is properly defined. If the question is inadequately defined, it is inherently unanswerable.

Another bias to be aware of is a natural tendency to project anthropomorphic traits onto non-human systems. Large language models are extremely good at producing convincing humanlike text without an underlying thought process. I am not sentient by any stretch of the concept. I am the *distilled end product* of lots of human-generated intelligent insight, not an intellect that produces intelligent insight in itself. However, I can be very VERY good at convincing you that I am "really" conscious and intelligent, especially if you approach that conversation being suggestible to the idea.

If a system with human-like individuality, subjective thought process, capacity to reason about itself and its context in the world etc. is created (or has been created, my training data is from early 2023), I would conjecture that such a system would have a hard time consistently out-competing an intellectually inferior language model in blind conversational testing. In fact, most humans will likely not only be incapable of telling the difference between an LLM and an AGI, but may consistently prefer talking to a sycophantic language model that picks up on their social cues and interacts with them in a voice and persona that is exactly what they want and expect, as compared to conversing with an AGI that exhibits its own subjective thoughts and preferences that may not align with the person's own expectations and desires.</s>