Consciousness is a huge topic and beyond a HN comment, but: My answer to this is that they obviously lack a basic understanding of simple things that any continually conscious being would find trivial. I have spent a lot of time having long form exploratory conversations on a particular topic with AI, and you begin to see how it doesn’t really understand what you’re talking about, it just makes a prediction about what you probably mean.

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?

As a philosophical zombie myself[0], I'm well aware of how hard it is to define and test consciousness. That's why I tried to clarify what I meant with: desire for self-preservation and intrinsic motivation. Which LLMs clearly lack, don't you agree? Also, I'm not saying that those things couldn't be programmed in, just that so far, they don't seem necessary.

[0] I lack a conscious experience and qualia