Well, the scientific context is that nobody ever defined consciousness rigorously (successfully). When computers appeared (actually even before that), there was a huge debate on whether a machine can acquire consciousness and how.

As defining consciousness was deemed near-impossible, scientists came up with the idea to give up on defining it and just treat it as a blackbox. That was the Turing test.

So, as ChatGPT passes the Turing test, we lost a tool to disregard its consciousness.

I see many pop-sci people say the ChatGPT can't have consciousness given how simplistic the model is. I agree with the simplicity, but the problem here is that we don't know what in human brains really constitutes consciousness.

Anyway, I think some experts probably won't admit AI has consciousness (given that they don't even know what it means). What's on the horizon is that we non-experts give up on this discussion again after experts did a few decades ago. Or they even admit that many of us actually function no better than ChatGPT, and that's true when I read my students' homework!