Can you elaborate on this? What are the specific "stronger and most core aspects of consciousness"? And why are you certain that they are stronger and "more core"?
The first paper picks out e.g. arousal/wakefulness, phenomenal quality / qualia, unity (how we feel sensory inputs and qualia as a unified scene), access consciousness (instrumental self-observation and modification broadly), meta-cognition and self-modeling, emotional valence (e.g. pain/pleasure).
One might also include intelligence (abstract reasoning / argument, information integration and abstraction, attention) broadly, and also agency / desires / drives / will. Insofar as these are aspects of consciousness, yes, AI (and simpler algorithms and mechanistic structures) demonstrate aspects of consciousness. But insofar as embodiment, self-reflexivity and qualia (phenomenal consciousness) are the more mysterious and more obviously unique aspects of consciousness, current LLMs very clearly are lacking these things in most ways (whereas animals are much less clearly lacking, especially when you get to mammals and primates).
Seriously, just ask an AI this stuff, you'll get very detailed responses, nothing I am saying here is new or obscure.
And I broadly disagree that the AI lacks things like qualia, self-reflexivity, and embodiment... at least that it lacks them any more than humans do.
Qualia: ultimately, all qualia are inputs and outputs, at least as far as modern science has been able to derive. There's nothing special about "hearing", it's just sound waves tickling some sensors which send some signals which trigger some neural pathways. Same for smell and sight, it's all just inputs being processed in different and efficient ways. An LLM only has token based input, but that's input nonetheless.
Self-reflexivity: an AI is capable of thinking about itself, and indeed papers have shown that larger models are capable of a self-awareness that can demonstrate that they realize when their weights have been manually tampered with, including being able to figure out how they were tampered with. The AI will quite literally output "you have injected 'ELEPHANT' into my weights" in some of the tests.
Embodiment: I don't know how one can confidently distinguish between an embodiment in a biological substrate vs a digital substrate. Both things actually exist at very high complexity in the real world. The substrate may be worlds different, but that alone doesn't suggest that one thing is conscious while the other isn't. You would need some missing 'magic' that we haven't yet discovered to truly understand.
In other words, I find it uncompelling that AI is clearly lacking any major aspects of consciousness that humans are clearly not lacking.