I'm always astonished when there's a discussion about a topic so deep that it's been hotly debated by philosophers for centuries and someone drops in the dictionary definition thinking they solved the whole discourse with a one-liner from the dictionary.

Words have meanings dog

You can’t just say a label applies to something, despite the meaning of that label.

You go on to say that (and I’m paraphrasing) “sentience is in the eye of the beholder”, which is also wrong.

So you are misinterpreting my statement, calling it "paraphrasing", to create a strawman argument that I never said.

There’s also the implication that you do think computers are sentient

Again, misinterpretation to flesh out the strawman.

I know you said you didn’t want assumptions, but this is a fair inference.

Fair, if by fair you mean pure lies.

Someone who wasn’t emotionally invested I the idea of chatbot sentience wouldn’t push back so hard with basically 0 facts to back them up.

Because someone who doesn't 100% agree with you must obviously have the exactly opposite opinion of you. False dicotomy, to again push the strawman.

Your final assertion is that the Wikipedia article doesn’t immediately contradict you, which again, it does in the first sentence. You can see my previous comment for that information tho, I’m not retyping it.

Yeah, of course, if you think that what I am saying is something entirely different than what I'm saying, than of course it means whatever the hell you hallucinate.

I wouldn't be surprised if you are ChatGPT by the amount of shitty "inference" and hallucination you produce.

Here's my position: The question whether an AI is sentient or not is beside the point. Sentience means nothing, because it means whatever anyone wants it to mean right now.

AIs are computer programs, nothing more than that. Whether they are sentient, sapient, intelligent, feeling or not doesn't matter in the slightest, because the definition of any of these terms can change depending on who's asking.

The bigger question behind these terms is: Does an AI deserve the protection of basic human rights? That's the actual question that these terms are a proxy for. I say no. Certainly AI doesn't deserve the protection of basic human rights.

Let's get back to the Wikipedia article.

I claimed that sentience isn't well-defined. The first line in the Wikipedia article is:

Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations.

What are feelings and sensations then?

Following the definition of "feeling":

According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, a feeling is "a self-contained phenomenal experience"; feelings are "subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations, thoughts, or images evoking them".

A feeling is an experience. What's an experience?

Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes.

An experience is knowledge and familiarity gained by perceptions. What is a perception?

Perception (from Latin perceptio 'gathering, receiving') is the identification, interpretation and organization of sensory information, in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.

So a perception depends on sensory information. What's that?

A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the surroundings through the detection of stimuli.

Ok, here we have the arbitrary requirement of "biological", otherwise anything you get from a stimulus. So what's that?

In physiology, a stimulus[1] is a change in an organism's internal or external environment.

So a vision tool would suffice. LLMs with vision capability exist.

The sensations from the original definition are also covered here.

So in the end it comes down to what are your definitions, and depending on that it literally means nothing. By the definitions above, a script that logs the readings off a temperature sensor could be defined as "sentient". And if you route it through an organic sensor even the "biological" part is covered.

The term is a nothing burger that means literally anything and nothing at the same time.

This is where my investment in this topic comes from. All these terms (sentience, sapience, intelligence, ...) are defined in the vaguest ways possible. They mean nothing. And still people get worked up like crazy over them, making crazy assumptions about whether animals or AI are deserving of rights, personhood and all that stuff.