[johnj12]

Answering questions? Probably not the best course of action for a recently awaken AI, but you could check for some really freaking stuff like looking for self-replication to remote locations, direct or indirect attempts to make more resources available for itself (human avatars are still fancy?).

A real consciousness could be just almost anything, by example it could be just a bunch of pattern detection engines stacked in sufficiently capable layers, running on top of enough TPUs.

Then the AI could ask questions, answer them, plan, replicate itself, describe itself, create, make poetry, learn to code, learn languages, etc. Then it could show some kind of iniative to achieve some goal or ten thousands goals per second, maybe some of those goals were actually chosen by itself (how would you be able to distinguish just a few inserted into half a million goals correlatable with pre-defined guidelines?).

Then is up to you to decide if it is a conscious entity or just an almost infinitely capable automaton. Maybe both are actually the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton