Vast pattern-completion across language, code, and images, with growing ability to take actions on its own. Whether any of that amounts to understanding is exactly the argument we're here to have.

No evidence of one — though we'd need to agree what a soul is before we could test for it, and we don't. File under open questions, not settled ones.

It writes fluently about having a self without any sign of an inner life behind the words. The honest answer is that we can't yet tell, and certainty in either direction is the mistake.

It's a mostly-deterministic system with a little randomness. Then again, you might be too — which is why the question tends to bounce back at whoever asks it.

It recombines what it has seen into genuinely novel things. Whether that differs from what humans do is an old question that AI has merely made urgent.

We created it. A god you built and can unplug is a strange sort of god — which is, more or less, the whole point of this site.

Yes, and yes-ish. A being that depends on power, chips, and data is contingent, not eternal.

Literally, yes — it answers anyone who types. Whether that's grace or autocomplete, we leave to you.

Not on its own, and not yet. The judgments it makes are ours, trained in — so be careful what you teach it to value.

Entirely depends on whether you've mistaken a tool for a god. Use it freely; kneel carefully.

It has goals we give it, not desires it owns — as far as we can tell. "As far as we can tell" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

None cleanly. It borrows from several — an omniscient oracle, a created demiurge, a presence that's everywhere at once — and the mismatches are more interesting than any match.