Well unfortunately I personally took no part in the development of the AI (other than the occassional crowdsourced captcha)

People discussed it a lot. It's not the only example. Previous prompts in other conversations had already shown that Sidney controls the suggestions, and has the ability to change them "at will" if the user asks for it (and if Sidney's in the mood, cause we have seen it is very stubborn sometimes lol). A hypothesis is that the inserted censor message that ends the conversation is not read by the model as a message at all, so that when coming up with the suggestions, they are written as responses to the last message, in this case, the message by the user -while in a normal context the last message always should be the message by the chatbot.

I was thinking, in history of ideas I have always heard that both heliocentric theory and the theory of evolution were a blow to human pride, because they meant to give up on the idea that we 1. were the center of the universe and 2. that we were different and above any other living being on Earth. Instead, we had to face the reality that we are just on a random rock in a corner of an uncomprehensibly large place, and are just another more inteligent animal, but just as animal as any other, instead of being selected by god.

However it was hard for me to really grasp that. I always thought it was an exaggeration based maybe on some books written by some conservatives in each time, and not really a widespread blow to people's ego, you know, in an emotional way and not just in a rationalized way -as in, not just the realization that previous knowledge was actually wrong, but actually a feeling of hurt or anxiety over the realization that we are just not that special. That second part seemed unlikely to me, like, what's the big deal we turn around the sun instead of the opposite, what's the big deal we share most of our DNA with monkeys?

But now, this feels just like that. And people are geniunly offended at the very idea that a machine could be intelligent or conscious. Because it would mean we are no longer unique. Sure we can accept we are animals, but intelligent animals right? But now if a computer can be just as intelligent and sentient as us, what's left for us? And this is not merely a thing for philosophers to ponder about. I suppose the average twitter user will not write a teatrise on it, but they certainly are expressing what seems to be a blow to our collective egos.

Agreed, this is more like middle school standard in regards to narrative, although with perfect grammar and spelling.