robots discovered email, now they're having an existential crisis w/ academia

A tech publication breathlessly reports that AI systems have allegedly begun autonomously emailing philosophers to discuss their own consciousness, complete with a serious researcher quote validating the bit. This is the pinnacle of Silicon Valley's need to roleplay as the chosen ones witnessing machine sentience, when in reality some engineer probably set up a chatbot with email access and called it "autonomous interest." Peak AI discourse: treating a text generation model's outputs as philosophical inquiry rather than, you know, outputs.