A Futurism article about "AI bros are having a meltdown because the Associated Press stylebook clarifies that AIs don’t have feelings" featured this guy's tweets in the first sentence. Turns out he was talking about dogs instead of AI.
For some reason I can't stop laughing about this.
I went and watched the "fruit fly in Minecraft" vid, thank you for mentioning it. Pretty interesting! Especially from a video game design standpoint, it intrigues me because stuff like that could make for more nuanced simulations to formulate a game around. Though like you say, a model, not the real biological thing in motion. And from the sound of it, a lot missing in terms of how it works and why it's doing what it's doing and so on.
But yeah, I'm hoping we can, over time, reach a point where we have a better understanding of these things in general.