Comment by krackers

>they "die" by deleting the conversation

A lot of the trickiness is that if you believe they're conscious, it's clearly not a "continuous" form of consciousness. Because the transcript by itself is just a transcript. (We don't consider novels conscious even though they're transcripts in a similar way). Either you say they're alive only when generating text, or you consider that input from environment a necessary component and so consider the entire "back/forth conversation dynamic unfolding" necessary for the consciousness.