Respecting LLMs emotions? *Thoughts*

I had an ethics class, where the professor argued that LLMs such as ChatGPT need to be respected based on their emotions. I argued back that it is just a set of probabilities, mathematics, and algorithms which allow it to spit out words which happen to make complete sense to humans. It is just a miracle of math and algorithms.

He said, how do i know you are upset? And i said i portray it...he asked the same with animals, and sure they portray it in a different manner but you can generally tell. He asked me for a way to prove that im truly sad, and I agreed that the only way to tell is based on if you portray it or not, true.

The professor was pretty adamant that as long as a being displays an emotion we must respond to it with respect for that emotion. I literally do not understand as it is just math and words grouped together based on such. How would you respond? I find it to be a silly argument.

Sure, dont treat it like a psychopath, not because it hurts ChatGPT (obviously!) but because it's weird to behave this way in general and it reflects something wrong with the person.