>Would the most sentient ai ever actually experience emotion or does it just think it is?

When you find yourself asking a question like this, change the sentence around to reference people and see if you can give a clear answer. Like this:

Do people ever actually experience emotion or do they just think they do?

And you have now just wandered into some extremely deep waters. Even if you can convince yourself that *your* emotions are real, how do you know that anyone else actually *feels* emotions? Maybe you are the only one.

And once you have thought about this long enough, you are almost certainly going to realize: we will never know for sure.

And that leads to the next really troublesome question: what are we going to do about it? Should we give digital agents the benefit of the doubt?

And even though I always say "there's always one in every crowd," it does not seem to help; it's like they can't help themselves. Still, here is my disclaimer: I do not think that any current digital agent is conscious, feels things, or anything of the sort. I am just not entirely certain what my reason here is.

And to the folks who heard a YouTube video about how transformers work and think that explains everything: it does not. We have a pretty good idea of how brain cells work in detail, but we have no idea how we get from some chemicals and potentials to consciousness. So just knowing how the building blocks work does not necessarily mean you have any insights as to how the system works. Emergent behavior is a thing.