Nobody knows what conscious even means. All definitions of consciousness involve some fuzziness and "subjective experience" - it's a meaningless question. If you could define consciousness in terms of test, like a Turing test, it would be easy to train a model to pass that specific test, but that model would still fail at all kinds of other tests and the needle of what constitutes consciousness would move, just like it has been with language understanding and reasoning.
Let’s refuse the entire concept of consciousness. Everyone experiences something that we call consciousness and that’s why it’s reasonable to assume that a random stranger does as well. Sure, some organisms have more elaborate information processing capabilities than others.
If I encounter a living being (whatever that means) or an AI, I don’t care if it’s conscious or not. I care about interesting conversations, working on something together, just helping each other, etc. If the entity does this consistently why should I care about consciousness?
According to these metrics AIs are like an animal in the zoo. I poke around a bit and I am entertained by what it can and cannot. Also, I realize that we’re not too far from having useful artificial companions.
