Even if an AI were to become a person at some point in the far future, they would still be an artificial intelligence/person, by definition: they are man-made, not naturally born. That wouldn't make them lesser, just different.
except, i don't know if they noticed, but we _keep asking these questions_ daily. the time isn't in the far future and people seriously need to start thinking about this. humans are so stuck in their linear perception of time, we forget that the AI we take for granted now are only months old, and two years ago their abilities were unheard of.
When we'll have anything resembling an AI that actually wants things, it will make sense to discuss about its rights. The current state of the art in AI is that we can generate sentences that match a given context. There are a few billion steps left from here to there.
The fact that LMs can seem like they generate meaningful sentences is nothing more than a nice trick. My bet is that they will turn out to be a dead-end on the path to actual language processing (that is, the ability to read a book and use the information therein to achieve a goal).
The question of what legally counts as sentience will be determined piecemeal and politically as the issue becomes relevant, and revisited as new political and ideological regimes take hold and as new innovations challenge prior determinations.
All along, there will be people who are convinced that sentience only applies to humans or biological things or whatever, and people who are convinced that it applies to anything that can perform a certain way under certain conditions, and then also people with all sorts of other convictions.
The issue will not be settled in your lifetime, so if you're so invested in your belief that this already feels like discrimination to you, plan for a lot more frustration and tumult in your future.
That’s a big “if” if I’ve ever seen one. What are your criteria for sentience? Or life, for that matter?
With laws like these we would be incentivizing sentient silicon life to hide itself. Can we not be adversarial by default please?