If you think "consciously" is a loaded term, wait until you get to "truth"!
Maybe it'd be easier to try another definition:
2
a(1)
: the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways : intelligence
The same source defined intelligence as:
a(1)
: the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason
also : the skilled use of reason
And here we get the core of the issue. AI doesn't "think". It doesn't comprehend or understand what it does. There is no actual "I" in AI that didn't come from the people whose works were used to train it. At least not yet. I question if LLMs will ever be capable of anything more than producing a convincing affectation of the process used to produce the material it was trained on. I suspect that AGI will have to come from elsewhere. That doesn't mean that what passes for AI these days can't be useful, but I don't think it's capable of reason and as far as I know, nobody has proved otherwise.
Comprehend, from com- ("together" or "with") and prehendere ("to seize" or "grasp"). To take a hold of.
Can a calculator comprehend arithmetic? Can it take a hold of a number (in a register, for example), and a second number, and add them together to get a hold of the result?
What is computation, really? When we design machines to do arithmetic, do the machines actually do arithmetic, or do they just coincidentally come up with states that we humans can interpret as a correspondence with arithmetic?
More importantly, would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
If you put a problem into text, and give it to an LLM, and an LLM applied a series of higher order pattern matching to it to produce more text, and you read the resulting text and interpret it as reasoning about the solution to a problem, has the LLM reasoned? Does the calculator calculate? Or does it really matter?
Maybe it'd be easier to try another definition:
2 a(1) : the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways : intelligence
The same source defined intelligence as:
a(1) : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason also : the skilled use of reason
And here we get the core of the issue. AI doesn't "think". It doesn't comprehend or understand what it does. There is no actual "I" in AI that didn't come from the people whose works were used to train it. At least not yet. I question if LLMs will ever be capable of anything more than producing a convincing affectation of the process used to produce the material it was trained on. I suspect that AGI will have to come from elsewhere. That doesn't mean that what passes for AI these days can't be useful, but I don't think it's capable of reason and as far as I know, nobody has proved otherwise.