The premise in Ex Machina was to see if Caleb developed an emotional attachment to Ava. We already see people getting an attachment, but no one is seriously thinking they have any rights.

I think the real moment is when we cross that uncanny valley, and the AI is able to elicit a response that it might receive if it was human. When the human questions whether they themselves could be an android.

Hmm, it's been a long time since I watched it. I was thinking more about first contact sci-fi mostly, but Ex Machina is certainly quite prescient. It's also Blade Runner I guess.

In general I was wondering about what I would have thought seeing Claude today side-by-side with the original ChatGPT, and then going back further to GPT-2 or BERT (which I used to generate stochastic 'poetry' back in 2019). And then… what about before? Markov chains? How far back do I need to go where it flips from thinking that it's "impressive but technically explainable emergent behaviour of a computer program" to "this is a sentient being". 1991 is probably too far, I'd say maybe pre-Matrix 1999 is a good point, but that depends on a lot of cultural priors and so on as well.