I'm not really sure what the point of having a conversation about consciousness is. As far as I'm aware no one has ever actually been able to define consciousness in such a way that it could be tested for.
So how could we possibly know one way or the other?
Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness
Oh great so we've only just started the article and we're already mudding the waters. This bodes well. There is no reason to necessarily believe that a system has to be conscious in order to be intelligent. We have multiple examples of consciousness without intelligence (see my fat cat) so there's no reason to believe that the inverse can also not be true.