Yikes.

"What is my purpose?" "You format the document."

More seriously, why does an AI need to emulate full human intelligence and respond to prompts to call itself sentient in order to translate a document, order a pizza from the restaurant or tell me what the weather is today?

Being able to parse language and form coherent sentences is one thing. Telling the prompter that you're a sentient being is another.

Not disagreeing at all but I am failing to see why this is "yikes"? Is it the idea of creating something as complex as intelligent as a human just to translate documents?

> why does an AI need to emulate full human intelligence and respond to prompts to call itself sentient in order to translate a document

I have absolutely zero experience with AI, machine learning, etc. but I feel like translating a document is something that having near-human intelligence would be very useful because of how much context is lost in translation. Is that incorrect, though?

Again, not disagreeing at all, I just want to iron out what is misconception on my part.

I think the problem is created sentience just to format a document. Nothing wrong with creating a sophisticated program to format a document. But once it haha actual sentience it seems wrong to the delegate it to just formatting a document

That's my opinion about AI as well. Human-like general intelligence means that the AI may decide to not do what a person asked of it or even become dangerous. What's useful is that the AI is "smart" at doing what it was asked to do. That it stays within the confines of the task(s) assigned to it.

+1 We need the Singularity to make sense of the mess known as PDF.

But realistically, might this bring on the SkyNet attack if we abuse AI so?