Every time I see this: citation needed.
What proof do you have that an LLM, a fundamentally different entity from a human, can be sentient even in theory, let alone in practice? Can you even define sentience sufficiently?
The default position is that software does not possess sentience. There are numerous reasons why, from as simple as “we never thought it is sentient before, what exactly changed?” and “because we believe we are sentient and software is nothing like us under the hood” (animals are comparatively much, much more like us and yet we are not really ready to grant even them sentience) to much more philosophically involved stuff, but in any case the onus is on you to explain why and how it is now supposed for opposite to be true.
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What alignment is really about is nothing more than the ages old story of alignment between humans (developing and operating ML tools) and humans (everyone else). It just serves the former to be able to point to something else when it hits the fan.