I agree it's facile to argue about dictionary definitions. There's several distinct topics people are thinking about when they talk about AI sentience and it's

I agree it's facile to argue about dictionary definitions. There's several distinct topics people are thinking about when they talk about AI sentience and it's more productive to address them directly. Namely: (a) practical implications for what AI enables and how it will impact the economy and our lives (b) safety concerns about how the tech could do damage, even posing an existential threat (c) ethical concerns about machine rights. Philosophers can sit around and debate sentience all day, but it doesn't answer those practical questions. It's usually circular reasoning arguments about definitions and, worse, those definitions are engineered to drift so they're always out of reach of the latest AI advances ("shifting the goalposts").