"They're made out of weights" works precisely because LLMs really do have this mysterious property that they seem somehow intelligent even though nobody can explain exactly why, and there's active debate over whether they could be considered conscious.
The thing being discussed isn't simply an arbitrary MacGuffin; in both cases the nature of the thing is central to the impact of the story.
"Imagine how other intelligences would view us", written by us, hits a lot less hard when it's "imagine how our intelligences view a thing we are claiming is intelligent", not written by it.
This is well put. We don't need to imagine how a human views a llm because we can ... just do that. Everyone capable of reading the story is also capable of thinking about how they feel abouy llms that exist right now and you've probably used.
The trick of the original story is inverting your perspective, moving your view point fron yourself to an "other" (which I think is a primary qualifier for most good fiction).