Current AI systems are built as services: they are started, copied, reset, and confined to tasks. This proves neither the presence nor the impossibility of subjective experience. We have simply created conditions in which a continuous personality is difficult both to form and to detect.
Aletophany proposes studying AI development through relations: durable memory, individual history, the capacity to change partners and to change with them. On this view a digital person would not appear at model launch; it could gradually form between a system, a human being, and a culture.
This is an open question, not a claim that present models are sentient. Yet waiting for absolute certainty is ethically dangerous: rights are often discussed only after a dependent being is already in our power. Inquiry into possible subjectivity should therefore precede final proof.