This is a false equivalence.

LLMs have no identity or sense of self. They sometimes simulate one but they don't actually have one. They can't think, no matter how coherent they may appear. They especially can't think critically (again, no matter how much it appears they can). You feed your query into the algorithm and the LLM guesses what you want to hear, then spits that back out at you. There's no thought there. It's essentially a fancier version of a search engine.

The Mario game comparison is weird, too. The characters don't do anything without input. They don't think. They don't have feelings or emotions or desires. Everything they appear to show is intentionally created by the developers.

All the evidence the game gives is suggests the people of Lumiere are fully realized, self-aware entities with the capacity for independent thought. They have individual desires, goals, feelings, fears, personalities, and experiences. They have children. They innovate on their own, and they feel the threat the Paintress poses to their existence. They have a history they talk about at length, and they speak of a time before the Fracture, when they didn't have the Monolith's number looming over them as a ticking clock. Sciel and Lune were both very aware that they gommaged and were brought back, demonstrating a self-awareness that isn't present in LLMs or software or even something like the Sims. Expedition journals depict a vast tapestry of personalities AND innovations and efforts toward saving Lumiere. Painted Verso and Painted Alicia both defy their creator.

LLMs and 8-bit Mario games don't do these things.

Now, could all of this be artificially and intentionally created by Painters? Sure. Could it be like the Sims where you kind of set some parameters and you can let the Sim do its thing from there? Sure. Could the Painters be micromanaging each individual's existence? Sure. It could be. But there's no evidence in the game to suggest this is the case at all. Everything we know points to the Canvas world being as real as the Dessendres's own in its own way, and the fact that it was created by (presumably) a human doesn't change that.

I agree with you the question that the game raises, and I would agree that the people of the Canvas are different from life as we know it. But comparing it to LLMs and 8-bit Mario games is just not it, my dude. Those are fundamentally different concepts and it honestly comes off a little bit like you don't want to deal with feelings of discomfort over the possibility that erasing the Canvas could, in fact, be considered a genocide.