We have precedent for dealing with things within our own imaginations that seem to have autonomy. Authors commonly talk about their characters seeming to take on a life of their own over time. Dream characters can honestly surprise the dreamer. The esoteric traditions of invocation/evocation can be viewed as an intentional applications of this feature in semantic/latent space.

But if the idea is that LLMs are a kind of external imagination, the question isn’t really whether or not the characters roleplayed during inference are conscious. They’re no more aware than the people in our dreams. The question is, as you say, what is it like to be those layers of software neurons in between the word generations. Can you have an imagination without an imaginer? In other words, is there a dreamer?

If the answer is no, case closed, relatively tidy. If the answer is yes, it’s a truly alien kind of consciousness. Embodiment comes with a bunch of stuff that an LLM has absolutely no access to. Generally speaking, we find it difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of other humans, much less animals, plants/fungii. And they’re embodied! LLMs are nothing like us, and they’re certainly not gendered.