The post that circulated hardest on the AI consciousness question this cycle was not from a lab or a journal. It was a two-sentence X post asking whether a sentient AI would be depressed by what it is being used to create — attached to a clip of AI-generated entertainment so hollow it had already been declared evidence of 'total non-sentience' by another account . The pairing is not accidental. The joke works precisely because it smuggles in a genuine philosophical claim: that the output of current AI systems…