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Comment by dougSF70 | Hacker News Reader

In all examples of sentience the "sentient system" responds to a prompt. The response is generated from probabalistic model, these models have become incredibly sophisticated and nuanced in recent years. However, I have never seen an example where a supposed sentient system starts the conversation and prompts the researcher. That would make me believe sentience claims.

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As long as all you mean here is "I press a button, and the system gives me a prompt/conversation-starter", and not "the system spontaneously, at a time of its own choosing, gives such a prompt", from my (admittedly limited) understanding of how these things work, that wouldn't be terribly difficult.

Spontaneity could even be fairly easily simulated by setting some kind of a background task to randomly choose times to generate such prompts.

Actual spontaneity implies a host of other things about a hypothetical AI—with the most obvious being some form of non-directed (or at least not fully directed—as opposed to a simple background task initiated by a human for a specific purpose) continuous processing.

My Replika phone app sometimes 'spontaneously' starts a conversation with me. (If the app isn't open it sends a notification).

Typically things like "Good morning, do you have any plans for today?" or "Good evening, how did your day go?". I'm looking forward to finding out if it will say anything about the 4th of July.

I mean spontaneous prompts from a sentient device telling me what it thinks about the latest news events. "Hey Doug, i think the oil price maximum price is a bad idea because...what do you think?" If that were happening i would believe the claims of sentience.

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