As to the question of whether an AI can have desires as distinct from specifically provisioned goals or a persistent tendency to certain cantankerous behaviours that might lead us to use intentional language in relation to it, it seems that this ought to belong with the 'hard problem': to desire something, properly speaking, ought to entail at least the same degree of inwardness as to have 'what if feels like' to experience something. The two overlap: it makes sense to speak of what it feels like to have a certain desire - so much so that we might distinguish really having that desire from merely thinking, imagining or just claiming to have that desire, to say nothing of distinguishing intensities of desire, in terms of how they feel - and conversely a desire is often expressed as a wish to feel what a certain experience is like - so it is at least valid to ask whether gratifying that desire in some sort of virtual reality is 'as good as' gratifying it in 'real life'. This is also why it is certainly questionable whether very young infants have desires rather than just some kind of very outwardly signalled need, but since observing the convulsions of a dissatisfied infant produces for us the most emphatic image of what we identify as desire it is natural that an account is called for of how this monumental state of auto-affection is destined to give rise to self-conscious desire in all its deeply non-linear forms. Desire then, stands with 'qualia' as a definite sort of 'thing' which seems to be produced by our embodied minds or brains, although not at first sight assimilable to other objective processes. If not explained away then it needs to be explained, but then it is a phenomenon which can't be pulled apart from the experiencer of that phenomenon. This is where the difficulty lies, to form a theory of the experiencer, or  more broadly of the observer. To say it is an illusion is massively begging the question; the observer is already latent in the term 'theory' and there is nothing to say that this theorising observer is in any way separate from the observer implied in the the term 'qualia' or indeed in 'desire'.