> So in the spirit of that discussion--why do you think the things that Prime Intellect served were human?
I can't speak for the fictional group of humanity as a whole in that story, but I'd wager _they_ felt they were human, and there was an unambiguous lineage from the original humans.
I understand that it's just a story that makes you think about the grey area, it's just that for me it ends at "we used a sploit to genocide the human race because we were super bored reactionaries."
The redeeming theory for me is that their ending is just for them, Prime Intellect just sort of walls them off in their own shard and the rest of humanity goes on without noticing.
Implicit in your view is that if something thinks it’s human then it must be. I think that is an interesting viewpoint.
When I read the end, I felt relieved. It felt like a nightmare was over. So my viewpoint is that those creatures were not real / living in a literal sense, but more like remnants of something that was once really alive.