i think it's been more from the cultural ideas we've built up on/in scifi. you get all the automoton and their struggle for humanity stories from asimov and all the others, each one building up to the idea that a sufficiently complex machine could feel ways about stuff.
so now we have these charletans claiming to have built a sufficiently complex machine (they haven't) so now we must question if it does indeed feel to prove if it is sufficiently complex.
and it's frustrating because the entire point of the stories were to affirm the humanity of all humans and now we're searching for the humanity in machines at a time where we are being pressured in many ways to deny the humanity of certain humans.