[A]nyone capable of transcending the eternal now of the news cycle and recalling the debates of a decade ago might hear echoes in the [Blake] Lemoine story of quite another dispute about personhood and language. LaMDA is not a single chatbot but a collection of chatbots, and it thus constitutes a kind of corpus mysticum, an entity whose personhood might be said to exist in a purely figurative sense, just as the Church and its members are called the “body of Christ” or—to take a more germane example—just as Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., is considered a legal person. Indeed, one of the central delusions of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision was not merely that corporations were persons, but that money was speech—that numbers in their grossest iteration could be construed as a form of constitutionally protected expression. And beneath the commentary about LaMDA and AI personhood, there existed more indelible confusions about the difference between aggregates and persons, about the distinction between numbers and language, and even, at times, about what it means to have emotions, complex motivations, and moral agency.

Meghan O’Gieblyn, “You Talkin’ to Me?”