It's related in the sense that people start from the assumption that it does exist, ergo humans have it, and we have no way to see that LLMs have it, so that's why we're special and they're not, and their form of "just autocomplete" is totally 100% completely different (read: less dangerous!) than our autocomplete, which allegedly has a "free will" step involved.
The autocomplete argument is calling them fundamentally dumb and not self aware. That's separate from free will. A cat can have free will but we don't care much about its desires, and even if the universe is deterministic we still give people rights and call them intelligent.