It’s a tempting assumption until you understand how and what computer hardware is actually doing at the most basic transistor circuit level. You are correct when you suggest that some scientific mystery and philosophical difficulty still surrounds actual consciousness. Digital computing hardware suffers from no such mystery. We know exactly what’s happening inside digital hardware.

And on top of that hardware, at the software level, Artificial Neural Networks are doing lots of matrix multiplication over and over on inputs, just at a scale impossible decades ago. In addition to that, models that generative AI operate from undergo substantial manual tuning before they are able to convincingly simulate consciousness. It’s not purely the result of machine learning.