Last year, an artificial intelligence engineer at Google caused a massive stir when he claimed that an AI chatbot he was experimenting with was "sentient." (See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-claims-ai-chatbot-is-sentient-why-that-matters/). While AI tech has not yet brought us sentient artificial intelligence, i.e., AI that is not just following a programmed algorithm, AI chatbots that have come into wide use in the past months, like ChatGPT, have caused a massive stir in their own right, demonstrating that sentience is not required for AI technology to be massively disruptive and to raise a host of complex social, business and legal questions.