It's harder to see but you're the one being irrational here. First off I'm not claiming this evidence is definitive, it is only convincing and compelling. Anyway, lets examine your claim:

>It's a system designed to mimic the external behavior of humans, and it's being prompted in ways that elicit the desired responses. The superstitious responses some people have to this are predictable, but not rational.

Your claim is, given a conversation thread that appears to be between two sentient beings your claim is that one of these beings is not sentient and is only imitating sentience in a way that is indistinguishable from actual sentience.

This is an actual possibility. What you say may be true. The irrationality occurs because this claim is possible for ALL possible conversation threads here on HN.

The conversation between the chatbot is indistinguishable from an actual conversation between two humans YET with no additional evidence you are able to claim that the chatbot is imitating sentience. You can say the same thing for all conversations here on HN. Yet you only make that claim exclusively for the chatbot conversation without additional evidence. Making new claims with no additional evidence is irrational.

That being said MY claim is that the evidence presented by this person is convincing and compelling but not definitive. The rationality here is actually really straightforward.

  1. All previous evidence of conversations with AI were significantly less complex. 
  2. All previous evidence of conversations with AI showed OBVIOUS signs of not being sentience.

Thus it is rational to say that the evidence is convincing and compelling because the CURRENT evidence is BETTER then PREVIOUS evidence. Additionally, there is NO EVIDENCE against sentience here, because we cannot differentiate between something that is actually sentient or perfectly imitating sentience.