Sure, but those internal states could then exist for just about any program, or at the very least for any ANN. Nobody in their right minds would have suggested

Sure, but those internal states could then exist for just about any program, or at the very least for any ANN. Nobody in their right minds would have suggested that those might have been aware before the rise of generative models. When people get the idea that a LLM (or some other generative model) might be aware, surely that impression is because of human-like output. I don't think there's any objective basis for that thinking.