Actual Thoughts I've Had, Verbatim...

[user328]

There's a sense of the AI actually relating to something in its own culture, which is an unmistakably human/animal tendency.

Its own culture is everything it read on the Internet while it was being trained. And it regurgitates bits and pieces of that based on what you say to it. While this type of AI mimics the unconscious associative underpinnings of human consciousness in some respects, it's really just looking up words and phrases based on context. Contextual ads were doing that 20 years ago, and nobody suggested that they were sentient. This is just a slicker way of doing it.