Two narratives, one story;

1. An AI developed by Google has developed sentience - the ability to have its own thoughts and feelings, and a Google engineer working with it has been fired for making the story public.

2. A Google engineer thinks a 'chatbot' AI should be treated like a human, because he believes that it has developed the ability to have and express its own thoughts and feelings. After Google looked into and dismissed his claims, the engineer went public with them, and was then placed on paid administrative leave and subsequently fired.

The subject of the first story is artificial intelligence - with a juicy ethical human subplot about a whistleblower getting (unfairly?) punished.

The subject of the second story (which is a little more nuanced) is a human engineer going rogue, with an interesting subplot about ethics around artificial intelligence.

I think most of the reporting has been around the first version of the story- and I think thats because it fits into a broader ongoing narrative; the idea that 'our' machines are getting smarter - moving towards a point where they are so smart that humans can be replaced.

Its a narrative that stretches back for centuries - at least as far back as the industrial revolution.