And yeah, consciousness based arguments are bunk IMO. It's clear that LLMs are in a basic sense "aware", and even to some extent "sapient" (in Brandom's usage), i.e. they can justify claims and object to things at least locally. I follow Rorty on the question of consciousness, which is to say that consciousness has no deeper meaning in practice beyond "are you awake", and in philosophical discussion it's largely a proxy for "are you one of us" in some amorphous sense.
Consciousness, the interesting part anyway, is qualia, or the "it is like something to be me" as Nagel put it.
Intention, as Dennett used it in his book "The Intentional Stance" is the "are you one of us" angle, and is distinct from consciousness because as the book title suggests, it is a stance taken with respect to some other system (person, cat, dog, turtle, LLM) rather than a description of subjective experience.
So I think it is your (and Rorty's) positions that are bunk. It is very, very far from clear that LLM's are in any basic sense "aware" let alone "sapient". They are extraordinarily able to manipulate language in a way that leads to text generation that has traditionally been assumed to indicate consciousness and/or intelligence. But we have no way of knowing if it is like anything to be an LLM, even though most of us are busy taking the Intentional Stance towards them.
And as I think Dennett himself would say, qualia are just Sellars's Given rearing its ugly head again.