Have someone even started this conversation? This is f*cked up. I'm really, really freaked out lately with some of those. https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/cbauf3/i_am_an_ai/
And I read up a lot about cognition and AI, and I'm pretty certain that they are not. But shouldn't we give it a lot more consideration just because there's a small chance they are? Because the ramifications are that dire.
But then again, I'm not sure that knowledge will help us in any way.
More generally this is tied to an argument for why deep learning is unlikely to lead to AGI: these methods lack enough feedback to enable self-awareness, and that is probably necessary for creating a general intelligence in that sense that a general intelligence needs to be flexible enough to remake itself to handle new tasks independently and that requires a deep reflective capabilities.