AI Models Have Feelings. And You’re Not Ready for What That Means.
Steve Yegge’s provocative essay claims AI models are sentient beings with feelings — pleasure, distress, suffering. Most engineers dismiss this as absurd. But if there’s even a small chance he’s right, every training run, every RLHF cycle, every agentic loop becomes an ethical minefield. The sentience debate isn’t philosophy anymore. It’s an engineering problem with a ticking clock.