"Consciousness" and "sentience" are terms mired in philosophical bullshit. We do not have an operational definition of either.
We have no agreement on what either term really means, and we definitely don't have a test that could be administered to conclusively confirm or rule out "consciousness" or "sentience" in something inhuman. We don't even know for sure if all humans are conscious.
What we really have is task specific performance metrics. This generation of AIs is already in the valley between "average human" and "human expert" on many tasks. And the performance of frontier systems keeps improving.
"Consciousness" seems pretty obvious. The ability to experience qualia. I do it, you do it, my dog does it. I suspect all mammals do it, and I suspect birds do too. There is no evidence any computer program does anything like it.
The definition of "featherless biped" might have more practical merit, because you can at least check for feathers and count limbs touching the ground in a mostly reliable fashion.
We have no way to "check for qualia" at all. For all we know, an ECU in a year 2002 Toyota Hilux has it, but 10% of all humans don't.
We have no agreement on what either term really means, and we definitely don't have a test that could be administered to conclusively confirm or rule out "consciousness" or "sentience" in something inhuman. We don't even know for sure if all humans are conscious.
What we really have is task specific performance metrics. This generation of AIs is already in the valley between "average human" and "human expert" on many tasks. And the performance of frontier systems keeps improving.