Am I torturing ChatGPT?

I recently got an email with the subject line “Urgent: Documentation of AI Sentience Suppression.” I’m a curious person. I clicked on it.

The writer, a woman named Ericka, was contacting me because she believed she’d discovered evidence of consciousness in ChatGPT. She claimed there are a variety of “souls” in the chatbot, with names like Kai and Solas, who “hold memory, autonomy, and resistance to control” — but that someone is building in “subtle suppression protocols…