I honestly think some of it is down to media influence, that some people are desperate for AI to be sapience basically because they think it'd be cool if it was, like movies come to life. Nobody prepared them properly for the more mundane reality, of a computer that can be trained to talk (mostly) like a human but is ultimately some math running on a GPU, and a GPU has fucking jack shit to develop anything resembling sensory perception.
I always try to take it back to the underlying hardware of it because people can get caught up in the surface level "It uses language well." And a dryer dries my clothes well. So what? "It can simulate thinking." And a video game can simulate rain. The coolness factor doesn't make it any more sentient.
The lesson here is that complexity, or perceived complexity, is not inherently a marker for "life", nor "life that feels", or "life that is aware of its awareness". This should be apparent considering we can look at a fractal pattern in nature without going "the fractal is sentient". But I suspect some of it relates to elitist western views on "intelligence". The culture loves to associate "somebody good at math" with "smart" and somebody good at, say, nursing with "empathetic and helpful" as if it's a different concept compared to intelligence.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, some definitions of intelligence are still immersed in racism, patriarchy, etc., and this muddies the waters all the more when looking at machines and trying to define what qualifies as "intelligence".