Why would a text generator ever be conscious? Was this really worth writing a paper about?

Animals are also next token/action generators, and we also think (simulating a string of events). Maybe humans are better at grouping these events into more powerful network activations to retrieve better results

I think gpt-image-2 at least incorporates representations from the base model, even if base model doesn't itself have the output capability. And it does have image input fused directly into it that helps make those representations more usable for image gen, so it's not just generating text.