In behavioral psychology, the mirror test is designed to discover animals’ capacity for self-awareness. Last year, an engineer at Google, Blake Lemoine, claimed that the company’s own language model LaMDA was sentient (Google said the claim was “wholly unfounded”), and just this week, users of a chatbot app named Replika have mourned the loss of their AI companion after its ability to conduct erotic and romantic roleplay was removed. What we know for certain is that Bing, ChatGPT, and other language models are not sentient, and neither are they reliable sources of information