"Is X conscious or not" is an entirely unserious question today, unless this is just a headline followed by actual (and explicit) examination of the various aspects of consciousness being discussed. But, even still, LLMs are probably only conscious in like 2-3 or so ways, most of those meaning broadly "intelligence", i.e. reasoning, problem-solving, etc. When it comes to anything experiential or embodied, AI might eventually get more of these, but LLMs based on recursively applied linear algebra are clearly missing too many core aspects of consciousness to be considered conscious in any broad sense.
To quote wikipedia:
> It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. There is no consensus on what exactly needs to be studied, or whether consciousness can be considered a scientific concept.
Move to the different aspects / parts / things involved when we talk about consciousness (experience / phenomenal consciousness, self-modeling, intelligence, agency, embodiment, wakefulness/alertness, attention, etc) and you can have very clear, meaningful, and unambiguous discussions on almost every point, but there is no coherent unified "consciousness" as normal people use it, and the folk concept can't be salvaged.
This article is bad because it just keeps trying to make the folk concept do work that the concept is simply too messy to handle usefully. But in fact if you avoid trying to find some mysterious essence or all-capturing definition, there is huge progress and lots of interesting stuff to say (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/).