We have torture factories for animals so I'd rate the chances of avoiding LLM torture factories as... not good.

While that might seem a facile rebuttal I think I might actually agree with the substance of the article. My point I guess is that we're societally pretty bad at assigning consciousness to anything non-human. While I don't think LLMs are conscious and this is primarily the ELIZA effect in action I also agree there's something emergent (perhaps within language rather than within the neural nets) that dismissals as a mere stochastic parrot miss.