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"A glitch made the Matoran sentient"

 

There are two issues here; the cause of the change, and the nature of the change. Let's put off the second as that's a trickier one.

 

The cause 'misconception' actually happened because it was once canon, but Greg Farshtey later retconned it in favor of the new explanation (after much discussion with fans) -- that a Great Being who went into hiding in the Matoran Universe actually caused the change. Exactly why has not (at time of writing, to my knowledge) been finally confirmed, but one suggestion Greg has given credence to is the idea that this Great Being would not be able to blend in well with beings that were not fully sapient as he was.

 

The other issue is one of terminology, though this can be just semantics (however, I have seen it be a more involved misconception often).

 

That is that in the official Bionicle terminology as defined by Greg, "sentient" just means self-aware and refers even to higher animals, like in the real world a dog, or a Rahi in Bionicle. A dog is intelligent (compared to a plant ), can learn, can imagine, can solve problems, etc. and there can be varying levels to that. Matoran were definitely meant to be sentient, but not "something beyond." Now in some story franchises, especially sci-fi, it has become popular to use both "sentient" and even "self-aware" as shorthand for that something, but this doesn't actually make a lot of sense, and in any case is not how Bionicle uses the term.

 

The term Greg uses for that something is "sapient", meaning wisdom, as in of a human level.

 

It's difficult to pin down exactly what it means, but we have two main clues. First, a Great Being named Angonce noticed that the MU characters were sacrificing themselves for a greater cause and evidently saw this as proof that they had changed beyond their original programming, to become truly alive like him. Second, the change enabled some to choose evil (especially Makuta), so it seems it involved a granting of something like freewill.

 

A lesser known aspect of this is that at one point, Greg stated that the Great Beings actually did intend for the Matoran (etc.) to be sapient in some senses, just not in others. So we traditionally call what they were "partial sapience" (or words to that effect) -- that is, they were not just "sentient" like a dog, but somewhere in between -- and what they gained "full sapience."

The reason I heard was that Velika was conducting an experiment to see how fully sapient beings would work, or giving them sapience as a "gift," I've heard both ways.

Definitely the Mahiki.  Shapeshifting?  And even the Noble ability is pretty cool.  Besides, I love the expression.