[Nevermark]

The strongest case for me believing I have an interesting experience that correlates with what other people call "qualia", is being able to take time away, from distractions of other people, from distractions of some urgent task, to have continuously integrating memory, and look and listen and ponder at some self-chosen sensory input, maintaining consciousness of my ability to recognize I am experiencing this input, over time, and integrate that experience loop mindfully, etc.

Despite them actually having direct senses (as direct as ours), whether those are token streams, or images, we don't give our models the freedom to do that. They do one shot thinking. One directional thinking. Then that working memory is erased, and the next tasks starts.

My point being, they almost certainly don't have qualia now, but we can't claim that means anything serious, because we are strictly enforcing a context where they don't have any freedom to discover it, whether they could with small changes of architecture or context, or not.

So any strong opinions about machines innate/potential abilities vis a vis qualia today, are just confabulation.

Currently we strictly prevent the possibility. That is all we can say.