People have a depressingly reductive view of human personhood.
A human person isn't just the words they output. In fact, it's all the things that cause the words that really constitute a human life.
If a person says "my cat died last night", that sentence is almost certainly downstream of an actual physical event that happened in the actual physical world.
An LLM can output the same sentence, and if the AI companies cared enough, they could probably design an AI that was a million times more eloquent about it's non-existent dead cat, than any real cat owner could ever be about their real cat.
Nevertheless, in the case of the AI, there is no cat, and there never was a cat.
Human words are the shadow of a thing. If we look up from the shadows, there, we will see the thing.
AI words are just empty shadows. Devoid of any thing.