Talking to people is a proxy measure of their subjective experience, it isn't a direct measure. Since you can talk to a tape recorder and, so long as it plays back responses, you and the tape recorder likewise are engaging
as-if conversing.
Since computer science isnt a science, but a form of (applied, discrete) mathematics it encourages people to think in terms of functions with purely mathematical semantics, as if 2 + 2 = 4 were the same thing whether it modelled the divison of cells or the printing of a book.
What causes people to speak is our intentions, desires, theory of mind, representational ability, imagination... etc. We speak because we are in a shared world of social intentions, and we desire to communicate something about ourselves or this world to others.. we translate, clumsily, these features of our experience into text tokens; and hope that the agency we are speaking to can recover our mind from those tokens.
Over a million years we have specialised a culture of communication to enable this illusion to take place: the illusion that meaning is in the patterns of the symbols we use.
You can, of course, build a system to perfectly immitate these patterns; just as a video game, if you hold the viewer fixed, my appear to contain a world with a table and a glass. But if you reach for that glass of water, it isnt there: it's an illusion.
This is all statistical AI is: a trick. It's a replaying back of our own conversations to each other, as if it was a real conversation with us.
We can determine, as certain as you like, that there are no goals, intensions, desires, imagination, counterfactual reasoning -- no body, no observation. The machine is not in the world with us, and it not responsive to the world -- the machine generates text, it does not speak.
You inclination to analogise the machine to a person is just on the grounds that you are strapped into you chair, and observing the video game, believe you can grab the glass of water inside.
I am not strapped into a chair, nor do you have to be. You can do science: you can build real experimental explanations of how we form representations, intentions, goals, desires etc. And it is trivial to explain AI, there is no mystery to "compress reddit and query over its space of text tokens". There is only the illusion that the user is subject to -- the belief that the agency lies in this querying process, and not in the redditors who had cause to speak to each other about their experiences of hte world .