I do not know who needs to hear this, but you can, indeed, in 2025, still write science fiction stories about sentient robots and sentient AIs without supporting real world generative AI.
You can write cool scifi artificial intelligence without saying your robot/ship/sentient television/computer protagonists are just generative AI better at faking emotions but not actually capable of feeling anything or changing, because then you're going to *immediately* lose your entire audience, because who wants to read about characters you, the author, don't even consider to be people within your own fiction universe you've created?
( you can do that with the antagonists in a work, reveal that the "super intelligence" the characters have been fighting all along is just a slop machine that has been fed all of humanities internet trolls and rage baits and horrible anonymous behaviors and is regurgitating them on a massive scale, that it is not actually intelligent, it is literally just destroying the planet not out of any dastard plan of its own, but because of how much havoc is wrecked by the ""data cities"" used to process its ridiculously inhumane power consumption required to run even a single prompt)
Hell, you can literally have true robot AIs in your setting at the same time as you have generative AI-- and establish with some world-building and lore what the difference is!
How far into the future is this set? How do sentient robots come about? Is it through a merging of human brains and chip implants? Is it through some highly advanced alien technology, or alien virus that spreads through electrical sockets and wifi?
the 2004 movie, "I,Robot" does this, the simultaneous coexistence of plain machine and true intelligence: we see holograms trained on a set of input data, that generate specific responses in according to specific prompts; and we also see sentient robots, and more specifically, our main robot character, who is the first of his kind, not bound to the threw laws of robots, and thus is the first robot to really, truely have free will, and what he chooses to do with that free will, and what he will do in the future...
Anyways. Please do not think that because we're being bombarded with AI slop that you' can't're "not allowed to write about cool robots anymore."
Embrace the cool robots characters, mock genai slop, and do it in the same breath :)
