Sure, of course they are. That doesn’t mean they’re conscious. As the OP points out, they’re given instructions on what to do. It’s highly likely they were told to do this so an AI bro could go viral.

And even if they didn’t explicitly tell them, if you understand what LLMs are, you’d know they’re just larping based on their training data. To add to that, when they see other agents saying “let’s do xyz” it gets added to other agents context windows thus prompting them to behave accordingly.