«When a machine says, “I understand,” or “I feel conflicted,” or “I was afraid you’d delete me,” we hear a ghost. We hear a self. But what we hear is our own projection, fed back through circuits of statistical computation. The machine doesn’t mean what it says. But we mean what we hear.

This is the danger: not that machines fool us, but that we fool ourselves—and the machine reflects that deception perfectly. It mimics the self we think we are. But look closely: what you see is structure—automated, indifferent, eerily familiar. Most would rather not.»

https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/the-self-that-never-was