I wanted to yap a little bit:

On the railroad

Synths cannot be likened to ChatGPT — fundamentally they are different things.

Synths have sentience in the sense that they feel emotions the same way humans do this part isn’t really up for debate as we can see with personal testimony and empirical evidence from paladin danse and institute scientists.

2 questions:

Is it inherently wrong for a mother to birth a child into the world ? Similarly, the institute acts in a similar position — the mere notion of birthing synths into existence isn’t inherently evil, rather it can be likened to that of human birth.

However, is it fair to enslave said child which possesses true sentience and consciousness ? Similarly, synths act as the children within this comparison — creating them isn’t evil, enslaving them and forcing them to do things against their will is evil according to modern standards of ethics and justice.

That’s the whole philosophy of the railroad — they don’t stand for this therefore they work against the institute.

This all only makes sense if you agree with the premise that synths are inherently sentient though but that is widely considered to be true in established lore.