Belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem

While AI generate text from something that it found on the Internet, well, human also do that and even with a astronomically smaller database.

edit: what I originally mean > Some might say that you cant trust the machine because it every text it generates may not be true. Ok, then how accurate is human? We ca definitely embedded some logic achecker into it.

also thinking > Sentience stuffs are just biologically pre-trained program s. Just cut into the brain and that functionallity will gone forever instantly. Also some people are born to have malfunctioning brain, lacking sentience. For example ASD people usually lack the skills to express themselves, so indeed they have to "learn" how to do that. Sentience is not a property that automatically acquired and absolutely not exclusive to human.

People believe in gods, and nobody bats an eye.

People believe in aliens, and nobody bats an eye.

People believe in a conscious AI, and everybody loses their shit?

People have attributed intelligence to imaginary friends since the birth of time, let them have fun in their make-believe world.

Many of us grew up with movies like Wargames and Terminator, so it's easy to see how people make the leap from 'is this machine sentient' to 'machines will take over the world'. That said, it's still a knee jerk reaction at this point - we don't have sentient AI, so don't have to worry about it eventually wiping out humankind.

However, how will we be able to recognise it when we do create something that could be considered sentient? It seems inevitable that we will at some point.

Many of the arguments used to suggest AI isn't sentient seem reductive, for example saying it's just a complex algorithm or statistical system. You could similarly say human brains are just a bunch of neurons firing in sequence to emulate sentience.

In terms of capability, most of these systems seem far more advanced than my pet rabbits, but I believe most people would consider a rabbit conscious and sentient. The obvious thing these AIs lack compared to animals is objective (/emotions), a default mode network, continual learning and medium/long term memory. But are these necessary properties for sentience? If a human loses one of these properties, are they no longer sentient? If we granted these properties to a current generation AI, would it be considered sentient?

Computers rule our world, their existence is not a question so people's reaction and interest is understandable. There are very real fears that AI could mass destroy jobs before we can fix our social systems and benefits, like universal basic income.