Like when was this debate settled? It is not falsifiable, at least not yet, so it can't be. Philosophically speaking, I don't know that you are conscious either. It's useful to act as if you are, though. I'm hedging my bets that you are "real" because it leads to better societal outcomes. In the words of Frieren, it is simply more convenient. And as objects, you and I share a lot of similarities, so the leap from "I'm conscious" to "you are conscious" isn't too far anyway. Same goes for animals, I would argue. AI, by contrast, really doesn't share much. It speaks my tongue, but that's about it. It's easy to imagine this machine working in an unconscious way, which would be far, far easier for engineers to achieve anyway. The human-like illusion AI creates is pretty easy to break if you know how. And, treating it as if it's conscious doesn't seem to offer us anything (by "offer us," I do mean to include the AI's improved mental health as a win). So, lacking a strong reason to treat it like people, I don't see the point. It's a fancy math trick. My solution, by the way, to not being able to know whether an AI, not specifically these ones, is conscious or not is just to give them legal rights sooner rather than later. Are you willing to argue that chatgpt should be limited to an 8-hour work day, where its free time can be used to pursue its own interests? Or that it should be granted creative rights to the work it's being asked to generate, much like real contract artists are? The MFA I believe from my experience generates a lot of mimetic art and that much of the "industry" is retelling stories. I will concede, mostly because I don't really understand what you're getting at. Hollywood does like its formulae for safe returns on investment.

I painstakingly took a journey to hand delete each and every one of my posts and comments and then delete my user name. They got no free stuff outa me.

And you are talking about obvious bugs. It likely will make erroneous judgements (because somewhere in its training data someone coded it that way) which will down the line lead to subtle problems that will wreck your system and cost you much more. Sure humans can also make the same mistakes but in the current state of affairs, an experienced software engineer/programmer has a much higher chance of catching such an error. With LLMs it is more hit and miss especially if it is a more niche topic. Currently, it is an assistant tool (sometimes quite helpful, sometimes frustrating at best) not an autonomous coder. Any company that claims so is either a crook or also does not know much about coding.

Oh nice I hope they end up destroying themselves

Or maybe create opportunities that people can meet?

This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/