As someone who learned about Ai in uni and now works in Ai, this shit is straight up bullshit and its infuriating.
The most obvious thing about this being all bullshit is that the LLM's don't have their own idle emergent "thought" - they are purely reactive, so not sentient.
Case closed for fucks sake.
And those shadows are just as sentient as we are, even if they don't depict the world, they convey a perception of a hypothetical world in which they are accurate!
Trying to grapple with the meaning consciousness through input/output is so close to being philosophical zombies type interesting, and yet so far and vacuous in what he actually says, that could apply to dice picking which color the sky is today.
Also pretty hilarious that we would choose being WRONG, as a baseline (because LLM's are so bad) for outrospection, instead using the more natural cooperative nature of language. (Which machines fail at, which is maybe also why)
Honestly, I reckon a field of wheat would be more sentient than a chatbot. It can sense its environment and it doesn't even need a prompt to do its thing.