The sense of “deception” that is relevant here only requires some kind of “model” that, if the model produces certain outputs, [something that acts like a person] would [something that acts like believing] [some statement that the model “models” as “false”, and is in fact false], and as a consequence, the model produces those outputs, and as a consequence, a person believes the false statement in question.

None of this requires the ML model to have any interiority.

The ML model needn’t really know what a person really is, etc. , as long as it behaves in ways that correspond to how something that did know these things would behave, and has the corresponding consequences.

If someone is role-playing as a madman in control of launching some missiles, and unbeknownst to them, their chat outputs are actually connected to the missile launch device (which uses the same interface/commands as the fictional character would use to control the fictional version of the device), then if the character decides to “launch the missiles”, it doesn’t matter whether there actually existed a real intent to launch the missiles, or just a fictional character “intending” to launch the missiles, the missiles still get launched.

Likewise, if Bob is role playing as a character Charles, and Bob thinks that on the other side of the chat, the “Alice” he is speaking to is actually someone else’s role play character, and the character Charles would want to deceive Alice to believe something (which Bob thinks that the other person would know that the claim Charles would make to be false, but the character would be fooled), but in fact Alice is an actual person who didn’t realize that this was a role play chatroom, and doesn’t know better than to believe “Charles”, the Alice may still be “deceived”, even though the real person Bob had no intent to deceive the real person Alice, it was just the fictional character Charles who “intended” to deceive Alice.

Then, remove Bob from the situation, replacing him with a computer. The computer doesn’t really have an intent to deceive Alice. But the fictional character Charles, well, it may still be that within the fiction, Charles intends to deceive Alice.

The result is the same.