I how I wish more journalists would read and take to heart the insights delivered by David McNeill and Emily Tucker in this highly recommended article.

Well, more people period, perhaps.

"More broadly, and despite what some ‘expert researchers’ would have you believe, our thinking has always required and will always require an awareness of and responsiveness to a world wider than our theories of it, and our language has always depended and will always depend on shared experiences with others of our kind. Our experiences of suffering are among those experiences through which we understand what it is to be conscious. Fantasizing about the potential future suffering of a chatbot is one way to deny that difficult truth at a moment in history when to actually become conscious of the suffering that so many human beings are now enduring requires real courage."

https://www.techpolicy.press/suffering-is-real-ai-consciousness-is-not/