Literally just mainlining marketing material straight into whatever’s left of their rotting brains.
The entire question of sentience is irrelevant to the material impact of the technology.
I actually agree here. That part is irrelevant on its surface but it does keep getting brought up as part of the marketing hype and that part does have some effective consequences, including in this thread, where people buying into the LLM hype bring up those questions themselves and assign attributes to LLMs that simply aren't there outside of the aforementioned marketing hype.
I'm just not naive enough to dismiss the potential impact of machine learning
That impact, so far, has been mostly harmful because of who owns and who commands the technology. Analysis of that is fine, but most claims of how "liberating" it will surely be seem like idealism to me under the current material conditions and under the present system.
EDIT: Besides, you should look again at which position is bringing the sentience talk here:
https://hexbear.net/comment/4292155
And if we don't interact with the underlying philosophical questions concerning sentience and consciousness, those same dorks will also have control of the narrative.