It comes up because people are mistakenly conflating consciousness with moral personhood.

People want to be talking about whether AI suffers in a morally meaningful way. In non-human animals this debate is often centered around the question of whether the animal has conscious experience, because there's little doubt that much of the emotional and experiential systems are shared.

The analogy goes wrong with AI, where definitions of "consciousness" would seem to apply in the sense that the model clearly has a category for itself in its world model, feeds back on its output, etc. However the analogy between how it works and anything we would recognise as emotion or suffering is extremely strained.

The solution is to just focus on ths question of what we really mean when we think of morally relevant suffering. It's a much clearer question than "consciousness" and it sidesteps the problem.