I don't understand people calling them AI or chatbots, what makes you use that term? Living Memory is a real, physical space you can walk into with your own two legs, it's not the matrix. The last area where we fight the final boss appears to be more of a digital space, but everything outside of that is "real". The Endless are memories (a real physical thing you can see with your own two eyes in this world) given shape using aether. They are not really different from how the Scions appeared on the First, just missing a soul, but what is a soul? If the Alexandrians are to be believed, souls are just energy that is completely interchangeable and there is nothing distinguishing one soul from another, once clean. They are not programs, except for maybe Sphene, who appeared to be partially a program, becoming one completely after the erasure.

Again, I think everything about this is incredibly stupid so I don't liking wasting time with semantics, but I wonder why these terms are being thrown around.