Scifi setting where machine learning and artificial intelligence are clearly distinct, where AI has true sentience, free will, and consciousness. AI are actual living synthetic lifeforms. The ethics of creating these is highly complex. And also very unstable and unpredictable, so it is not really done often.
Machines are smart insofar as making predictions and learning from mistakes, and very efficiently, but everything is raw data. But an android or other form of true sentient life, it turns out, while incredibly smart and capable, AREN'T extremely powerful. It turns out that mortality, or conditional immortality, and the concepts of empathy and morality are natural inhibitors. An android in a human body is aware of its limbs and pain and all the other burdens of flesh that we have. A non-humanoid, such as a computer system, is also presented with such limitations. A spaceship with sentience and a concept of the self can also have a natural prepccupation with its identity that keeps it from functioning at all times as an all powerful, all knowing perfect machine. It can have a bad day, just like any person.
"Consciousness transfer" is widely considered to be old-world fiction, as it is understood that an LLM trained on a person's likeness is only an aproximation of their former being and not an actual representation of themselves. While convincing, it is nothing more than a program. Many people's burial sites thus have a commemorative LLM where one may go to talk about memories of the deceased person, where the deceased person's LLM can communicate back anything they chose to document, and with who they would share it. If you were a dick and a backstabber, it is entirely possible you've been retconned and will never be able to get post-mortem closure.
However, this hasnt stopped people from trying. On a remote world, a lone researcher attempts to create sentient androids as blank slates, training and teaching them from their creation the mannerisms, thoughts, beliefs, and memories of once-living people, to continue their lives. Using a mixture of conditioning, LLM, and crude controversial biotech, this troubled genius has given birth to a group of androids, suppressing their own free will in order to seek acceptance living the life of a renowned human being, ocassionally haunted by the actual consciousness of the human they are impersonating, begging the android to live their own life and help them let their once-living souls finally find peace in eternal rest.
