[ben_w]

Might be, but as usual, people pick a side on qualia and are far too confident about that side.

We only experience qualia, we don't know what it actually is to have it, we don't know why the moist electrochemistry 'twixt our ears has it nor what makes it go away for most of our sleep only to return for our dreams (or if it's absent during the dreams and we only have qualia of the memories of the dreams), we cannot truly be sure that any given AI does or doesn't have it until we know what it is that it does or doesn't have.

We also definitely can't just ask LLMs, which has been a problem since Blake Lemoine getting fooled by an AI that was definitely making up impossible stories about experiences it couldn't have had, and both the fooling itself and the response to which demonstrated Alan Turing wrong with regard to the idea people would reject what he called "the extreme and solipsist point of view" of:

  the only way by which one could be sure that machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. One could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man.

- https://genius.com/Alan-turing-computing-machinery-and-intel...

These machines can absolutely answer "viva voce", even when we also know they're making stuff up.