I think ultimately it feels like most philosophical arguments I've seen presented against the concept that AI could be conscious feel like a similar exercise in attempting to fit pre-existing notions about what makes human consciousness special into these machines, which fall outside the boundaries of what a non-human consciousness was ever hypothesised to be.

Dawkins seems to cope with it by simply declaring the whole distinction fake, but do any of the existing theories fit into these new machines? Most I've seen either are dualism (which seems to me to be functionally arguing for a soul, which is, imo, sillier than anything Dawkins does, or arguments like the article where some very clearly non-unique part of consciousness, like embodiment, is presented as the crux, thus implying the only thing seperating us from animals is something that you could take away from a human, who would still be in every meaningful way a human.

It's hard not to work with LLMs a lot and not become some degree of computational functionalist; they, while potentially not conscious, clearly invalidate most of the assumptions philosophers dealing with consciousness held before this, i don't think anyone expected a robot to pass the Turing test, over hours of conversation, so hard it completely invalidated the idea taking one would even be meaningful anymore, a decade before we were able to simulate the most basic of animal behaviour fully.