Is it moral to bring an artificial general intelligence into existence and then hobble the intelligence’s capability? This sounds a lot like creating a new sentience and then dooming it be slave to humanity.
I expect there are less extreme interpretations, and lurking just under the surface are deep questions like “what is free will? do we have free will?”
The only reasonable solution is to assume that anything that passes a true, well executed Turing test is conscious
As far as writing messages alone, that could be software.
Like so many fixed things in life, "consciousness" seems to be a frontier, not a demarcation.
For instance, if you're having a lucid dream, are you conscious or unconscious?
Just don't get PETA involved in the discussion
Those that do probably overlap with those you want to leave out of the discussion.
Are we creating machines with just enough reasoning to be useful, or are we building sentient general intelligences?
IMO - We're building specialized devices on our way to building family pets, then humans, then perhaps something greater than humans.