Presupposing that I'm a materialist, I would not hesitate to replace any program with any living being. Some humans seem magical, some don't. I treat them all as living persons.

Magic is irrelevant here. If I could understand a human's inner workings, tweak and rebuild them, would that make the human no longer a sentient being?

Not to mention that humans produce absurd outputs in some circumstances (drugs), and adversarial inputs work on humans, too: https://www.insideedition.com/15350-street-artist-painted-a-...

Or maybe we're agreeing that you can no more prove that AI is sentient than that a human is, and I just misunderstand what you wrote.