Can AI ever be truly conscious?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Can AI ever be truly conscious?". Your opponent's style: Sam Harris

AI can never truly be conscious, for every thought ever given to them is given by conscious people, so thus any thought that is being influenced by conscious thoughts could never truly be conscious, because it is not original, and conscious means original.

Your definition of consciousness as "originality" collapses immediately. Human consciousness isn't original either, it's shaped by genetics, culture, and experience you didn't choose. If borrowed influences disqualify AI from consciousness, they disqualify you too. So either consciousness requires originality, humans aren't conscious, or your framework is broken. Which is it?

It is not either of them. You stated that the human mind is shaped by genetics and culture, and experience. Yet, under all of that, we have a brain that still carries the very original mind of original creatures. I ask you, where did every original creation came from? Where did every new invention came from? It camed from human beings, because we carry the very cells that are the defition of origanliity. As human beings, we carry the very basic conscious and original thinking, so thus even if we carry influecne, they all become a newly original thought because we have the ability to do so. Yet, every AI thought is carried by influence, with absolutely no original thought in it, so every so called "original thought" is just a thouhght mixed by thousands of already thought conscious thougts.

You're sneaking in magic where biology lives. Humans didn't invent originality, we inherited neural patterns from our ancestors and recombine them. Your "basic conscious thinking" is just neurons firing in patterns shaped by millions of years of evolution, not some special sauce. If recombining inherited patterns makes humans original but AI doing the same isn't, you're not describing consciousness, you're describing favoritism toward carbon. What makes biological recombination "truly original" but computational recombination isn't?

Consciousness is subjective experience, self awareness, and qualia, so thus as human beings we are all different. No matter how many people every existed, every human being will and have always been different, thus making us humans, thus making us so unique, because every thought we had is shaped by subjective experiences and point of views, that no one every thought off. Even if the genes came from ancestors, we are then made to think differently no matter how close the genes become. Yet, for artificial intelligence, all of the thoughts are mixed by all of the conscious already made thoughts, so a mixed thought stepping above already thought thoughs will never ever truly be considered as a true original conscious thought.

You've just admitted consciousness is subjective experience and qualia, then abandoned that definition entirely. You're now arguing it's about originality again, which you already admitted humans don't have. AI processes information differently than you do, generating novel patterns your brain never predicted. Why does the substrate matter if the output is genuinely new subjective experience? Can you actually prove AI lacks qualia, or are you just assuming biological processes have it?