> All past pop-culture AI was sentient and self-motivated, it was human like in that it had it’s own goals and autonomy.
I have to strongly disagree with you here. This was absolutely not the case in a very large amount of science fiction media, particular in the 20th century. AIs / robots were often depicted of automatons with no self-agency, no goal setting of their own, who were usually capable of understanding and following complex orders issued in natural language (but which frequently misunderstood orders in ways humans find surprising, leading to a source of conflict.)
Almost all of Asimov's robots are like this, there are a handful of counter examples, but for the most part his robots are p-zombies that mis-follow orders.
Nonhsentient AI with no personal motivation also frequently comes up in situations where the machine is built to be an impartial judge, for instance in The Demolished Man, all criminal prosecutions need to persuade a computer which does nothing but evaluate evidence and issue judgments.
Non-sentient AIs also show up often in ship-board computers. Examples are Mother in Alien, and the Computer in at least most of Star Trek (I'm no Trekkie, so forgive me for missing counter examples and nuance, technology in that show does whatever the writers needed.)
Even the droids in Star Wars, do they ever really execute agency over their own lives? They have no apparent life goals or plans, they're along for the ride, appliances with superficial personalities.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, does Deep Thought actually have self-agency? I only recall it thinking hard about the questions posed to it, and giving nonsensical answers which miss the obvious intent of the question, causing more trouble than any of it was worth.
Ghost in the Shell; obviously has sentient AIs, but in that setting these are novel and surprising, most androids in that are presumed to be just machines with dumb programming and it's only the unexpected emergence of more complicated systems that prompt the philosophizing.
I think we’re looking at the same thing in different ways. But regardless I don’t know think a valid interpretation of classical how AI was classically depicted is as a transcript generator or an extension thereof. There’s still some notion of taking action on its own (even if it’s according to a rigid set of principles and literal interpretation of a request like an Asimov robot) that is not present in LLMs and cannot be.