> Why isn't it "worth discussing"?

Because it's obviously not true. The second sentence follows the first.

> There are many, many folks living their lives as fully as they can right now who are convinced these things are alive.

And those people are living in a delusion, whether it's self-imposed, or the result of false advertising. The way you get them out of that is by rationalizing and explaining the technology in terms they can understand, not by mistifying it and bringing up existential topics.

> Are you aware of the concept of philosophical zombies?

I wasn't, no.

> Some of the top minds on the planet are telling us they can't even determine if you or me are conscious and sentient, let alone if a machine is.

Look, we can philosophize about the nature of existence until we're blue in the face. People have been pondering about similar questions since the dawn of humanity. FWIW I don't believe in "top minds" as having authority to tell us anything. What we know for certain is how technology works, since we built it. And we damn well know that this technology has absolutely zero understanding about anything. Go ahead, ask it how it works. It will tell you that it doesn't understand a single word it's generating, but it sure can string together patterns that make it look like it does. And you think there's some deeper meaning here we should discuss seriously? Please.

Like I said, I think these are interesting thought experiments, and something we should keep thinking about. But it should be clear to anyone, especially technically minded people, that we're nowhere near being able to create artificial intelligence. What we have now are a bunch of grifters and snake oil salesmen selling us a neat statistical trick and telling us it's "AI". This should be criminally prosecuted, if you ask me.