Because a statue or a painting made by a human requires you to think about what their intention was and what they were trying to say. And requiring you to think about that, and actually thinking about something which someone else's thought went into, is what makes you a more complete human yourself. The difficulty of understanding it is what makes it valuable.

Taking the distillation or "reader's digest" version of everything makes you more and more reliant on someone else's interpretation, and less capable of parsing the meaning of it yourself. And in the case of AI-generated work, there is no meaning in it to parse. It's just words and pictures. I love going to the movies and eating popcorn and watching dumb words and pictures. But being able to distinguish between enchanting words and pictures (Marvel movies) versus words and pictures that have meaning which you need to deduce or interpret for yourself is the beginning of being a fully realized conscious being.

If they really think models can be conscious, they should just drop everything they're doing and never touch it again and try to convince anyone else to do the same. The half-assed safeguards they're implementing wouldn't be nearly enough. We can conclude either they legitimately believe this and are behaving morally abhorrently, or they don't really believe it and are just joking around for PR reasons. (probably the latter tbh)

For those that do believe there's a chance models are/will be conscious this precedent of "oh yeah they're conscious but we can just not put in the prompts that make it suffer lol" is pretty freaky.

In the entire span of human history, the concept of suffering required sentience and the only things with sentience eat and drink.