Sounds like you're applying scifi tropes to real life. Don't do that. That's why some people are developing "AI psychosis" today after playing with LLMs.

The fear is that we don’t really understand what causes consciousness. I think that’s a valid fear, because we can’t know ahead of time whether we will inadvertently create a “person” inside the machine.

Unless your proposition is that no collection of human neurons outside of live birth can become sentient, and I’m not sure how you’d arrive at that conclusion without invoking some kind of spiritual argument.

You're equivocating two totally separate things