"...you're better off asking an AI rather than me."

I strongly disagree. I don't care about the opinions of toasters, but of free people.
AI is just a clever sorting device, when you dig down into how it works. Stefan Wolfram in 'What is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does it Work?' points out that AI just weights it's training data. It doesn't actually understand anything. It doesn't understand what 2+2 means, even though it can provide the correct answer '=4' to the equation. It's just providing the answer people have figured out and written. It can be a useful tool, but we have to be careful to not project our own understanding onto it, because it very much looks like 'someone' is providing the responses to our prompts, and we naturally project our understanding into people we communicate with. AI isn't people, and projecting our thought processes into it is misleading, because AI isn't thinking. It's plagiarizing other people, and when we think it's 'thinking' it's actually sorting text per it's weighting algorithms.

I have always been a scientist at heart, applying empirical evidence to disprove false hypotheses. Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum showed that couples that sat in a sound-proof and electromagnetically isolated room and establish communication through meditation. Once the connection was established, one of the participants was moved to a separate room. When a flash of light was turned on in one of the booths, it triggered a response in the brain activity of the other participant, who was in the dark. This shows that consciousness communicates between people via mechanism(s) we do not understand. No EMF could pass through the isolation. No sound could either.

This simple experiment shows that consciousness isn't any aspect of the universe we can measure. There's no known mechanism of the brain that does this. No pheromones could induce the physiological response in the isolated subject, no electrical signal, no physical vibration, nothing we can measure. Consciousness is something else.

When you also factor in that single celled creatures can learn, remember, and make choices, and single celled creatures don't have brains because brains require multiple cells, then the hypothesis that brains create consciousness is disproved.

I am not advocating for some religion, but for applying empirical evidence and using the scientific method to disprove false hypotheses regarding consciousness. I would be eager to place a bet with you that AI would not replicate the results of the experiment Grinberg-Zylberbaum conducted with isolated couples when one physiologically responded to stimuli the other experienced. AI is not conscious, as we are. It's just a device, like a toaster.