I wonder if Lemoine has read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein. That classic sci-fi novel features an AI supercomputer that runs a human colony on the moon. "Mike," as the computer consciousness becomes known to humans who realize that it's something like alive, talks about loneliness and death in the same ways Lemoine elicits. Actually, perhaps the better question is, does Google's AI program have access to the text of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?"

Some passages in the novel are eerily similar to "conversations" Lemoine has with the AI program.

I suppose it's more likely to be coincidence, but a human novelist like Heinlein would certainly understand how vulnerability would strike up chords of empathy. That's one reason his novel became a bestseller, after all.