This article examines arguments for and against the consciousness, sentience or understanding of machine learning particularly the new artificial intelligence (AI) tools and Large Language Models (LLMs) developed by OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and other big tech corporations and suggests some significant limitations in this sphere. In particular, it is argued that AI systems cannot access those realms of human experience concerned with our knowledge of our own mortality, nor can they participate in that membrane of mind which neo-idealist philosophers and scientists such as Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman contend is the ultimate source of all reality and experience of the world. However, the brute fact of the ever-expanding power of AI applications in terms of their information-processing capabilities needs to be acknowledged, and it is concluded that as non-human persons along with certain animals and inhabitants of the natural world such entities should be included in the wider community of the extended mind within which humans and machine intelligence systems may collaborate in the interests of the flourishing of everything on the planet.