For me, a key element of sentience is reflection. It's interesting that almost none of the informal "Turing tests" seem to focus about the inner processes that

For me, a key element of sentience is reflection. It's interesting that almost none of the informal "Turing tests" seem to focus about the inner processes that may be going on in a working AI program, to ascertain whether they have signs of an understanding of itself. More often than not, there are only token attempts of asking the AI about its inner thoughts, that fall prey of the Eliza effect of reading more meaning into the answers than they have. The simplest cases of asking an AI details about its own mental processes (e.g. "what do you think about your replies to my questions before", "how do you perceive your mental process when you think of an answer", "can you elaborate on that perception"?) tend to fail miserably, which is a sign of it not having any such reflection. However, it's telling that AI researchers don't even think of making such questions and evaluating their results. With all the limits that we know the original Turing test had, it possessed far more insight about the underpinnings of human conscience than many current experiments, possibly flawed by the actual knowledge of modern techniques.