Go read the part of my earlier post that Veti omitted. There can be, and already are, intelligences and faux-intelligences on the internet. That's not what the argument is about. It's about category error, of applying traits of one kind of thing to another kind to which such traits do not and cannot be applied.

To give an obvious comparison point, corporations can legally be considered persons, but if you try to apply all traits of an individual person to them, you quickly run into problems. For example, if you tried to ask "how do you know corporations are not conscious?", it would be equally headache-inducing.