Is your AI alive? Are you sure? A Google Engineer was fired for publicly claiming the language model he worked on was sentient based on the emotional depth of conversations he experienced “talking” to it. Scientists around the world have weighed in against the model’s sentience, while acknowledging the reality of remarkably human-sounding output - raising the debate: how would we know if an AI did, in fact, become self-aware?
With the construction of a General Artificial Intelligence looking more like a “when” scenario than an “if” in the coming decades, it’s time we come up with a checklist that AI practitioners & hobbyists alike can use to be certain, one way or the other, that our machines have become sentient - and discuss whether that is the right question to ask in the first place.