Comment by Tom McClelland

Large language models can be thought of as advanced role-players. They are really good at adopting roles based on what they've learned from their training data. That can include playing the role of a conscious robot. [...] If you have an emotional connection with something premised on it being conscious and it's not, that has the potential to be existentially toxic. This is surely exacerbated by the pumped-up rhetoric of the tech industry. Unverified source (2026)