[slowmotarget]

> It does not have an ability to independently think and imagine/dream

We neither if we're not supplied with energy. By the way, haven't we tried to replicate an inner dialogue by prompting the AI to recursively converse with itself? This could resemble imagination, don't you think?

> It suffers from catastrophic forgetting under certain internal circumstances (in addition to changing what dataset we trained it on)

I believe that the persistence of previous answers is what currently distinguishes us the most from the "AI". As soon as we're able to make the realtime discussions part of an ever evolving dataset constituting the AI itself, the gap will get thinner and thinner. But even then, are people suffering from Alzheimer sentient? I believe they are. Isn't it comparable with what happens when an AI catastrophically forgets?