One of the reasons I would think AI can’t be conscious is because it lacks any capacity for sensory experience. We come to know ourselves through our experience of the outside world. We can see this process play out with newborn babies. First they stare perplexed at their own hand because they don’t understand that their body is their own. Over time they come to see that they are beings distinct from everything around them. Sensory experience is necessary for this learning process. Imagine a person who is born unable to see or hear or taste or touch or smell or interact physically with the outside world in any way at all. How could such a person ever achieve anything like what we consider consciousness? So along with all the other hurdles, that is a rather giant one that any AI system faces. Any “consciousness” of a non-sensory, non-embodied system, would be so alien to us that we’d need an entirely different word to describe it.