I came across, what seems to me, a valuable article regarding LLM.
He does a nice job of describing the contest within which LLMs operate, and why they are not consciousness, and why users should be aware. They are tools not companions.
At Medium.com by Dustin Arand
For hundreds of thousands of years, if you spoke to something and it spoke back to you, then that something was another person with a mind like your own. Not necessarily sharing your beliefs, but forming them through the same kind of feedback from the world.
In other words, communication has always presupposed consciousness. So it’s natural that, with the arrival of large language models (LLMs) capable of simulating fluent and coherent speech, many of us interpret their utterances as the products of a conscious mind. Some of us even form relationships with them. …
… With LLMs, the tension that makes consciousness necessary simply isn’t there. LLMs work by predicting the next linguistic token based on the input they’ve been given and the data they’ve been trained on. That kind of prediction requires sophisticated calculation, but not judgment. Only one real value is at stake.
Furthermore, language is just the top layer of a much deeper cognitive structure that helps us model our world. …
… Indeed, as philosopher Elena Esposito argues, we should not even think of LLMs as a form of artificial intelligence at all, but rather as a form of artificial communication. … LLMs optimize for simulating the communication skills of human beings, not the underlying consciousness that makes them possible. …
Okay I’ll stop with the quotes, there are more that are of value -
Bridges to nowhere …
Talking to ourselves
Bridges to somewhere
“An A.I. chatbot isn’t a companion so much as a mirror, but a mirror made of adulterated glass, flecked with the financial motives of large corporations and the neuroses and biases of its users. This distortion is what makes it so seductive. Like the pool that deceived Narcissus, chatbots show us a reflection just distinct enough to be believably real, but not different enough to challenge us the way real relationships should.”
It’s fascinating, especially since AI’s are pretty much in escapable at this point. I got my Claude.ai now. Though I only use it as a glorified Google search engine and as writing coach - not for discussions or companionship 
