Your brain is a biological neural network that evolved to solve a practical task. The result is that your brain experiences something it calls consciousness. We now have artificial neural networks that are capable of doing almost everything your brain can do. It's not extraordinary at all to suggest that they might have the same phenomenon of consciousness that arises in your neural network.

Calling LLMs "chatbots" at this point just sounds like an attempt to dismiss them. These "chatbots" are now capable of answering any question you can think of more intelligently than 99% of humans. If you don't consider that intelligence, then your definition of intelligence makes no sense.