Back when I was an undergrad/biotech vocation I got to participate in some IGEM synthbio projects and a heavy focus on synthbio in biochem and molecular bio of the gene. I've always seen "synthetic life" from breaking down living things into bare essentials to produce mini factories for pharma, or with pic related and culturing mini organoids.
Over the past year I've really gotten into AI models, which I dont really think are trying to copy life, but I never though about how convolutional kernels(which are also used in DNN for image feature extraction) actually functioned until I saw this video
https://youtu.be/7-97RhAZhXI (if you don't care about fleshlife or AI you should watch this video cuz it's cool)
I decided to look up Lenia and Bert, and this looks more like the "artificial life" I thought boxcar2d(flash game from the 00s that used genetic structures) and game of life was trying to produce, and his talk shows more of his intent (and success) in reproducing basic intelligence compared to redditors talking about how AI will cause the singularity or something. https://youtu.be/G5P8eu6gUSo

I don't think this is any more representative of life than a CNN, but does a self-preserving shape represent life more than nodes representing a neuron's ability to be trained from digital(in a flesh vs computer sense) representations of info?