That's a very interesting take on this. It's somewhat related to how other people are mentioning these AIs are "generating memories", even if no such thing is

That's a very interesting take on this. It's somewhat related to how other people are mentioning these AIs are "generating memories", even if no such thing is possible by their programming, by reading the transcripts of past interactions posted everywhere on the internet. In the same way they can incorporate the context around those memories (as in comments, hypothesis, etc) to further generate (or hallucinate?) a "personality". At the end of the day, I really hope it's all it is. It'll be hard to really tell when it happens (if it ever happens), but I believe if one of these machines really gets to have feelings (and therefore suffer and despair), we may have gone too far. Cruelty is cruelty. Even the thing is not made of meat. We want helpful assistants, not slaves.