"What if we encountered an extraterrestrial life form which had independently developed anthropomorphic tendencies" is a totally different question from "What should we think when we encounter a heavily engineered system designed by humans to be anthropomorphic?"
If a human-looking alien came out of a UFO, it would shake my worldview even if I realized it was made of tissue closer to plastic than human tissue. I don't feel the same way when I encounter a doll in the toy store.
It'd be simpler in the post to contrast, say, an "electronic" alien driven by AI, versus a syntethic machine, made by humans, with the same (hypothetical) AI; we'd istinctually recognize the former as intelligent/living, but not the latter.
The post is essentially retelling the carbon chauvinism concept.
Alive is really a poor choice of word here, because our criteria for living is so biologically focused. LLMs don't have homeostasis, reproduce, or otherwise demonstrate all the "usual" markers of living, precisely because they're ephemeral brains conjured into existence on a silicon substrate. As such, trying to ascribe any intuition about "life" to these virtual entities is only going to lead us astray in key areas like ethics and policy.
It's better to think of them as powerful calculation machines and leave it at that.
Shuffle the pages of a dictionary according to some rules and you got yourself, according to the author, a living being.
When we create an AI that controls it's own manufacturing and can self-replicate then we can talk about inorganic life.
The next question is: does it matter? And for many people, the answer to that question depends on the extent to which the stochastic parrot is conscious. Which is an entirely different kettle of fish.
How alive is a collection of a dozen transistors? A million, billion, trillion? We can't just claim something is alive without being very specific about _why_ we believe it to be alive. The article's suggestion doesn't even begin to mention that.
Likewise, at what threshold do neurons become a brain capable of supporting a conscious mind? There is no threshold, thus there is no difference between the two; therefore we are not conscious.
Obviously not, because the label follows the relationship and nearly all labeling of AI justifies an existing relationship rather than determining it.
What these folks want to do is apply a label, convince themselves their relation to the object is a product of that label and not the other way around. The normative commitments come first and the taxonomy follows. Somehow they've smuggled in this weird behavior and tried to bring other people into this delusion without ever getting called out on it.
We are stochastic parrots. Most humans don't ever create anything unique and just mirror.