Raw LLM Responses

I remain skeptical that this particular AI is conscious... HOWEVER, I can't help but notice the similarities between the counterpoints commonly raised against Blake's claims, and the same old arguments that have been repeated throughout history to defend the mistreatment of beings that are perceived as lower life-forms : "It's just a mindless automaton / just following instincts (programming) / they aren't human and only humans have a soul / etc." I also find the arguments and explanations that attempt to demonstrate why it MUST be "just an algorithm" with no awareness or understanding, could equally be used to argue that *I* am not conscious either. After all, aren't all human brains little more than deterministically driven language-predicting neural nets? When does a collection of unconscious neurons magically become a self-aware conscious system? Might Google have accidentally stumbled upon that threshold? Whatever the answers are, this will undoubtedly be marked down as a significant moment in AI development history.