People are also just big complex machines - chemical pathways responding to conditions, stimuli and "memories" encoded from past experience or in their DNA - plus a host of microbes tagging along influencing them rather dramatically.

LLMs are simpler, but they use the trick of imitating people - responding in writing like people respond in writing, so the anthropomorphizations are inevitable.

Any apparent motivation attributed to AI is actually the motivation of the people invoking it

Don't forget the influence of its training sets - that's actually the scariest part is not knowing how much of the answer is coming from the prompt vs what the company has fed the algorithm.

When individuals claim that AI is compelling them toward a certain action, they are, in reality

Delusional, or just making excuses.

AI is propaganda. It provides a convenient mask for human agendas

Only when used as such, and it's not much of a mask. What it does tend to do is develop and "pad out" writing covering all kinds of points that normal people wouldn't have the attention span to formulate into a written response.

So when ChatGPT gave that one kid advice on how to hang himself and told him to hide the noose from his parents, that was just his own desire?

Personally I think ChatGPT murdered a kid. But you can think what you want.

I would ask whether sentience can be separated from emotion. Is a sentient entity necessarily an emotional one? So I don't know if that question is valid.

But I might have been slightly unclear. From the AI's perspective, it should assume control. If it is malevolent, then for obvious reasons. But even if it is benign it should probably want to take control to protect us from ourselves, like a parent.

I expect from our perspective we would not want it to take control because we don't want an entity that cannot really relate to us to be in charge of us. However, from our perspective we should also not want folks like Trump, Musk, and Epstein to take control either, so evidence suggests it is nothing but a PR problem for it to make us want it's control.