What if we discover that the real problem is not that ChatGPT is just a fancy auto-complete, but that we are all just a fancy auto-complete (or at least indistinguishable from one).
I've thought about this as well. If something seems 'sentient' from the outside for all intents and purposes, there's nothing that would really differentiate it from actual sentience, as far as we can tell. As an example, if a model is really good at 'pretending' to experience some emotion, I'm not sure where the difference would be anymore to actually experiencing it. If you locked a human in a box and only gave it…
It is important to note, that neural networks and brains are very different.