I am sick to death of breathless idiotic reporting about AI. No. A statistical model cannot feel pain. It can’t feel anything. Feeling is outside its existence. It generates output based on input and training and complicated maths. It “thinks” by essentially telling itself a story that happens to usually be close to true. It can do some impressive things for a pile of floating point numbers, but it is not and never will be a sapient being. It’s not Data. It’s not even R2-D2. It’s just a potentially useful blob of software. Stop anthropomorphizing the thing.