[ben_w]

In fairness, Page Rank and indexing are also… well, perhaps too big for a parlour, but they're (very good) tricks.

Is ChatGPT playing a trick on us by mimicking the sentience of the humans whose writings it ingested, or is the trick that by doing so it began to actually think like us and so simulates a conscious mind within?

I lean towards the former; but we don't know what sentience even is yet, so we can't prove it.