This may seem like a joke, but your answer will likely be in the vain of "conscious things are obviously conscious", which gets us nowhere.
I mean, self motivation and a desire to not be turned off can be programmed into even decades old AIs.
There is also apparently no real memory; if I tell it to stop doing something today, it’ll agree, then go back to doing it again tomorrow, with no memory of our conversation. This never changes, no matter how many times I ask.
Again we could debate consciousness forever, but in a simple sense, are there any other conscious beings without this sense of continuity? Not that I can think of. And so if everything we call “conscious” is different from an AI, then are we justified in extending it to AI?
Ruling out consciousness or qualia emerging from the inference in an LLM is just as invalid of a take as being 100% certain of its consciousness. We don’t know what consciousness really is, so only thing we can say with certainty is we do not know.
I think consciousness is not an abstract property in the world, therefore it’s tied to certain types of entities. Therefore an AI is not going to be “conscious” in the way an animal is, and never will be. This is a failing of specific language. Maybe the machines can be aware, input data, mimic what we see as consciousness, etc. but the metaphor of consciousness really doesn’t fit. A jet can move faster than an eagle but it’s not moving in the same way. We simply lack a sophisticated enough language to easily differentiate the two.
[0] I lack a conscious experience and qualia
I’d be curious about how you’re showing they lack either of those
