It is quite believable that AI might have a sufficiently detailed understanding of how humans express feelings (via text) that it is capable of emulating such behaviors quite accurately even without experiencing those emotions itself (possibly experiencing some other unrelated and unfathomable emotions in the process of doing so), the same way we humans can understand and model the behavior of other creatures without any emotional involvement (see various mathematical models of swarm behavior etc).
Such sophisticated capabilities (to understand and imitate our behavior to that extent) are clearly beyond those of animals, and animals express emotions even when no humans are present and even when their evolutionary history has not involved interaction with humans, so we can rule out the imitation hypothesis when it comes to animals. Thus, the comparison to AI is fairly nonsensical.
Such sophisticated capabilities (to understand and imitate our behavior to that extent) are clearly beyond those of animals, and animals express emotions even when no humans are present and even when their evolutionary history has not involved interaction with humans, so we can rule out the imitation hypothesis when it comes to animals. Thus, the comparison to AI is fairly nonsensical.