People called “James Bond” keep being born, growing up to serve in the Royal Navy and then join MI6. The government is currently tracking seventeen further cases in the 007 pipeline. We don’t know why it happens.

Let’s start with the billionaires and work down.

Counterpart.

We’ve made machines that pretend to be people pretending to be machines pretending to be people.

It’s especially true that the “AIs” like Claude or ChatGPT are fictional characters. Indeed, much of the corpus whose statistical properties they reproduce are human-written conversations between fictional people and fictional AIs.

They’re interactive fiction generators. Sometimes the fiction is “mainstream”, sometimes alternative-history, sometimes hard-sf, sometimes fantasy. There’s literally no way of knowing which without reference to something external.