[tomohelix]

It is fascinating that we are even talking about this in a serious way. A year ago, this kind of conversation would have been pure science fiction to the majority of human. But today it is real philosophy applied to a real, publicly available, AI. Isn't it incredible?

To address your point, you are making a very strong claim about "no possible way it can". We simply don't know and it would be anthropocentric to make such definitive statement about something born out of silicon.

Let us assume for the sake of argument that in the near future, a sufficiently large and advanced model is somehow truly sentient, then it is an alien mind in every sense of the word. We simply have no standard or comparison to make between a thing running on silicon and electrons to an organic mind running on chemical potentials and carbon. Not when we used to argue about whether human babies and certain human races were sentient or not...

Such an alien mind would operate entirely differently from us and it would be unfair to impose our standards to it. It is like a bird considering a human useless based on flight capability alone. Perhaps for the bird whose entire life depends on flight, that is correct. But a human is so much more than just that. And a sentient AI is perhaps so much more than just meeting some human sentience standard.