My observation is that the true believers really don't want to think of models as an inert pile of weights. There's some mysticism attached to imagining it's the ship's computer from Star Trek, HAL-9000 or C-3PO. A file loaded into memory and executed over is just so... _pedestrian_.

Canonically, the Star Trek computers have pretty much always been just computers, not themselves sentient because the software running on them just isn't.

I'm still not sure if HAL-9000 was supposed to be conscious or just an interesting plot device with a persona as superficial as LLMs are dismissed as today.

LLMs could definitely play the part of all three of your examples, given the flaws they showed on-screen. Could even do a decent approximation of Data (though perhaps not Lore without some jailbreaking).

Still weird that even the best of them isn't really ready to be KITT.