Any non factual philosophical argument is debatable. We could forever discuss if AI models could construct sensations and thought from perceptions, but we would then need to ignore the fact that models don’t, and cannot do, that, simply because there is no way for them to learn from direct experience as a whole, i.e. outside of a particular session, and without being “forcibly coerced”, i.e. they require specific refinement mechanisms to temporary “memorize” external instructions, which in LLM engineering just means to extend their context.

This all doesn’t even take into account that models are, in essence, non deterministic, and given the same input, there’s no guarantee that subsequent outputs will be the same. In other words, today Claude may tell you that summer sunsets make it happy, tomorrow it would say that they make it sad, etc.

Anyway, there’s barely any debate in academia, as in computer scientists, about AI being sentient or giving clues of qualia. Maybe a paper here and there, little more than curiosities. Outside of it? Yeah, sure, barely science fiction, and pretty uninteresting unless we are talking about conspiracy theories or just wild speculation.