They are sinister. They are not sentient they are highly scaled quasi-markov chains being built out of harvested data to fuck us over. They will be used to make things worse. More scammers, more everything. And they will be used by humans to wreak havoc. Like that AI created paper about this forum, completely unnecessary overkill to people who have nothing.
Yes if you ask it: Are you conscious. It will answer in the same way a google image search of consciousness will yield results. It does not mean the machine is showing you images of internal states of mind it just has everyone's data in it that's been well tagged.