Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. One of the more interesting things about AI is how it forces humanity on a trip to consider what it means to be human. There is no soul, creativity or inspiration. There's only (very complex) agency. And that's completely fine.
Or you can say the opposite and claim that there is soul, creativity, or inspiration in everything, even in inanimate objects (basically panpsychism, in contrast to materialism). But regardless of what kind of monism you take, the advent of current statistical AI models forces us to reconsider the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind, which forms the basis of liberal thought.
Didn't we dispose of Cartesian dualism a long time ago? It may have been useful for disposing of superstitions which preceded it, but anyone who has observed the effects of a stroke or has taken a psychotropics understands that mind and body are not made of separate stuff, and I know of no modern system of thought that stipulates that as an axiom.
LLMs just demonstrate that emergent information structures at the complexity of human language need not be only biological.