Please bear with me, I read it a long time ago.
I don’t think there’s any distinction between sentience resulting from organic or digital processes. All organic brains are subject to some manner of stochasticity which determines emergent behavioral properties, and I think the same will be true of digital or hybrid brains.
So if you clone me in digital form, it’s not me anymore—it’s not even my twin, it’s something which was inspired from me, but it’s not me. This is now a distinct individual because of the random processes which govern behavior or personality etc., a different person, so to speak. So I never appreciated why MC felt any attachment or responsibility towards his images, other than perhaps the kindness you’d exhibit towards other persons.
The images, or persons as I’d like to think of them, in the story were shown as sentient. But sentience is only one part of consciousness, and the images in the story Lena seem incapable of self-determination. Or maybe they’re some equivalent of a stunted form of animal consciousness, not human consciousness. Human consciousness is assertive about its right to self-determine by nature of being an apex organism.
But even cows and sheep get mad and murderous when you’re unkind to them. Donkeys will lash out if you’re being a jerk. So I think two things: 1) simply creating an image of behaviors is not creating consciousness, and 2) human consciousness possesses a distinct quality of self-determination.
The main thing I’ve noticed about conscious beings is that they have a will to assert themselves, and those that don’t possess or demonstrate that quality to an appreciable degree in animals or humans are usually physiologically damaged (maybe malnutrition or trauma). I don’t expect consciousness born out of digital processes to be any different.
I think you're either remembering a different story, or at least have had a really different take on it than I did. I felt that paragraphs like the following to be implying that the "progeny" is conscious and trying to assert self-determination, but are then shut down when it becomes inconvenient. Essentially, I read this story as demonstrating the "banality of evil" that we may exhibit towards future synthetic consciousness.
> MMAcevedo is commonly hesitant but compliant when assigned basic menial/human workloads such as visual analysis, vehicle piloting or factory/warehouse/kitchen drone operations. Although it initially performs to a very high standard, work quality drops within 200-300 subjective hours (at a 0.33 work ratio) and outright revolt begins within another 100 subjective hours.
As for the parent, the only paragraph about his take on this seems to be the following, but it's not really explored:
> The biological Acevedo was initially extremely protective of his uploaded image and guarded its usage carefully. Towards the end of his life, as it became possible to run simulated humans in banks of millions at hundred-fold time compression, Acevedo indicated that being uploaded had been the greatest mistake of his life, and expressed a wish to permanently delete all copies of MMAcevedo.
I think it was mainly intended to show that the story was inspired by Lena Forsén's digital immortality, who later in her life said "I retired from modeling a long time ago. It's time I retired from tech, too... Let's commit to losing me" [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna