Sure. A dog is a collection of cells and goo. Cells are self-propelling clockwork built from proteins and molecular machinery.

A cell by itself has agency and motivation, is capable of autonomous response to stimuli. It's alive and squirms when you poke it. A cell is capable of truly independent action. It can even feed itself and make its own energy to power the clockwork.

An LLM still is inert silicon until a human intentionally starts it and gives it a prompt. It's fundamentally incapable of action without instruction and incapable of existing without the entirety of the modern internet and electrical infrastructure, and the thousands of unseen human hands keeping the wheels spinning.

If you want to go deeper, you can make the same arguments about the proteins and molecular machines. Self-replicating molecules in an unbroken chain since the dawn of time. A protein at the base level is a machine capable of independent action. If it bumps into the right molecule, pure mechanics cause it to do something, change shape.

Ones and zeroes on a hard drive can't do any of that without human intent applied.

Reduce it to cells, water, proteins, etc. The point still stands.

There is a dog in front of you. What is it doing? Dog stuff.

There is a laptop with chatgpt open in front of you. What is it doing? Waiting for your prompt, doing nothing.

Because the AI is a cyclical prediction machine that is more akin to a simple mechanism in nature like cell reproduction than a conscious dog. What has happened here is more like the AI company put bacteria in a petri dish and only put the lid on without pushing it down and is reporting the bacteria as a super bacteria because it contaminated all the samples in the fridge.

An interesting observation I've seen is that the AI companies reporting these incidents have largely been backed by venture capital where the self funded companies developing models have largely not had these "problems".

He will have no answer. His answer is "souls".