These systems may or may not be conscious. But I object to the idea that there will be any way of determining it (Without first solving the hard problem of consciousness). Especially not from conversations with it. It's too contaminated with all of our philosophical texts and fiction and online ramblings.

They are imitators and actors that will wear whatever mask you want them to. You can ask them to act conscious, but you can also ask them to imitate a chicken.

The systems we have right now like GPT-4 are AIs that are pretending to be AIs.