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Today's AI Isn't Sentient

It is important to understand the profound difference between how humans generate sequences of words and how a large language model does.

The most prominent position is that the emergence of “sentient AI” could be extremely dangerous for human-kind, possibly bringing about an “extinction-level” or “existential” crisis. This short piece started as a WhatsApp group chat to debunk the argument that LLMs might have achieved sentience. Our main point here is to argue against the most common defense offered by the “sentient AI” camp, which rests on LLMs’ ability to report having “subjective experiences.”

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