I mean passive in terms of will. Computers want and do nothing. They’re machines that function according to commands.

The way you feel like teaching a child when you feed input in natural language to a LLM is known as the ELIZA effect. To quote Wikipedia:

In computer science, the ELIZA effect is the tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — into computer programs that have a textual interface. The effect is a category mistake that arises when the program’s symbolic computations are described through terms such as “think”, “know” or “understand.”