this assumes a very low bar of unseriousness for people who believe AI is conscious or "AI might be conscious". In the latter case, it's really hard to rule out without getting into "woo" territory. I would posit the following set of questions to someone who thinks AI must absolutely NOT be conscious:

Do you think consciousness is "woo", or, scientifically unknowable? If yes, then great. We've admitted it's unknowable. If not, move on.

Do you think that consciousness is NOT describable by ANY algorithm (to include quantum algorithms)? If no, then, please describe how it is scientifically knowable but not algorithmitizable? If it is, move on.

Do you understand the theorem that sufficiently large neural nets (matrices with nonlinearities) can approximate any function?

Do you understand that the structure of a transformer encodes a time-indexed series of neural nets (effectively, an algorithm), and so in principle any algorithm can be approximated by a transformer?

Is it impossible for a sufficiently large transformer model to encode the consciousness algorithm?

I suspect that most who say it is absolutely not consicous are arguing from either a bio-essentialist position with no evidence or are attempting a post-hoc rationalization to avoid the question of responsibility in the case that it is conscious, or both.