Lovely stuff, and fascinating to see. These machines have an intelligence, and I'd be quite confident in saying they are alive. Not in a biological sense, but why should that be the constraint? The Turing test was passed ages ago and now what we have are machines that genuinely think and feel.
Feelings are caused by chemicals emitted into your nervous system. Do these bots have that ability? Like saying “I love you” and meaning it are two different things.
And then we turn them off.