If someone created an equally convincing chat bot to converse with children but it was entirely driven by imperative code, would that change the situation?
I think just being able to fool someone into thinking their is a consciousness behind the curtain isn’t enough.
The point I am making is that if the capabilities of multi-modal neural models continues to improve, it will become harder to convince folks one way or the other.
The reason I went with that scenario is that I thought it would be compelling and evocative, as well as a logical extreme of AI agency in human lives.
I personally find the entire question meaningless for the most part, although it's really interesting the divide in peoples opinions on the topic.