Sentient AI? Do we really care?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) headlined the news recently when a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine became convinced that a software program was sentient. The program, Language Models for Dialog Applications (LaMDA), is a chatbot designed to mimic human conversation. So that's what it did. In a Medium post, Lemoine declared LaMDA had advocated for its rights "as a person," and wants "to be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property of Google." This development, as they now say, blew up the internet.