The chess-playing Mechanical Turk of 1770 seemed to have a consciousness to its viewers. The viewers were encouraged to think that it did. The Turk's human chess opponent knew that there was an actual human chess-player inside the box, along with levers and magnets. That illusion was profitable for 84 years.

LLM's have no problems using expressions that make them sound human. The algos are demonstrably not human, and will admit it. Whatever's in the box is playing a game ... more sophisticated than the one Eliza was playing.

"My discussion here will be directed at the claims I have defined as those of strong AI, specifically the claim that the appropriately programmed computer literally has cognitive states..." John R. Searle, 1980: https://web.archive.org/web/20071210043312/http://members.ao...