(edit: should note the HN submission title (at present "Despite what Watson said, Rosalind Franklin understood structure of DNA first") does not actually occur in TFA)

PS the whole "a group of things [can't] share an internal world" spiel is weird and just plain wrong IMO. Humans could perfectly well share an internal world if the technical means were there. The author has not yet realized that the idea of "the self" as a single well-defined and enduring object-type thing is only a convenient illusion created by our minds. Alas, the style of the piece does not really lend itself to a coherent counter-argument, it would be a useful companion piece if the author simply laid out their personal beliefs on this matter plainly.

So at least something is different, namely the text output changes (and therefore some internal state too, of course). I think your analogy is too simple, it does not have to be the case that the GPU has to act like the equivalent of the body for an LLM in this respect.

And in fact in our culture most people are VERY attached to these ideas, because it is tied up with "what makes us human", morality, and also death if you want to go there. So I believe for many people, for whom seriously entertaining the idea of a conscious computer program is so far out of the realm of possibility it hardly registers, talking about AI consciousness is simply a way to work through and re-assert these beliefs about human consciousness that they feel so strongly about.

Hence you get articles like this with barely any substance, but some weird need to signpost every sentence with social ridicule. "Dumbest", "absurd", "obsession", "viral", "wildly tiresome", "third-rail", "psychosis", "sect", not to mention the scare quotes everywhere. Come on...

Then voice-activated devices came out which (without making a secret of it) started recording after detecting some watchword, of course there were false positives but most normal people didn't really seem to care about that. Again this was used by the most paranoid or anti-technology people as an argument that "see, they're really recording everything like we've been saying all along".

Now a device comes out which explicitly and openly records everything within reach and applies AI analysis to it, and the precise people who should be most against it act like it's no big deal because supposedly this was already happening anyway - while, on the contrary, I think this is precisely the moment where the line is being crossed in a way that will have actual negative consequences on society, and this is the time to take a stand against it.

So ironically we see that the hyper-activistic all-or-nothing attitude is actually working against the very interests that its proponents claim to want to protect.

"The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale."