This seems like a very simplistic position on a rather subtle topic. I don't know of any good reasons to doubt that an arbitrarily large chatbot could pass an a

This seems like a very simplistic position on a rather subtle topic. I don't know of any good reasons to doubt that an arbitrarily large chatbot could pass an arbitrarily hard Turing test. If that's so, where is the bright line between Samantha and such a chatbot? The fact that current chatbots aren't very convincing shows that there's still a long way to go, but it doesn't demonstrate any categorical difference between chatbots and creatures that think - or that chatbots are categorically not "simulating thought" (whatever that means). I mean, I'm certainly not here to argue that Samantha is definitely "thinking", for any definition of that term. But you seem to be suggesting that anyone who considers the idea must be ignorant or not understand how ML models are trained, and I don't follow that at all.