You hit the nail in the head. It is about mimicry. Apes are often dismissed as just mimicking human behavior in many circumstances. Putting on a hat for instance. They don't know nor think about what it is about. And neither do babies nor even many adults. They don't reflect on it, and most definitely they don't reflect on their own thought-processes. They just mimic other humans around them.

Now mimicking the speech of people may give the impression that the AI has some thought-processes behind its speech because, it is text that any human might write. But there's no logic because there's no symbolic reasoning. There's just mimicry and trial and error. "Training the model" just means millions of trial-and-error practice runs.

What the (neural network) AI can NOT mimic is the actual (symbolic) thought-process of humans, because that is not visible anywhere. It can only mimic the input -> response -behavior of humans. Therefore no, the AI is not conscious. It is the proverbial zombie.