The other response has my thoughts right. Although the two things are separate, laypeople (and a surprising number of others too) seem too easily duped by false

The other response has my thoughts right. Although the two things are separate, laypeople (and a surprising number of others too) seem too easily duped by false claims of modern language models exhibiting "emergent properties" of potential sentience. It's absurd, to be sure, but that also means it would've been easy to tap into that to generate hype among such people.