"There's no philosophical debate to be had over it either, it is what it is, and that's all it is and ever will be; a clever trick as a means to interact with a dataset."
You can repeat this and its variants as much as you want; asserting it repeatedly doesn't make it true. The human mind isn't made of magic, it's software running on hardware. You can in principle run that software on other hardware without changing what it actually is in a meaningful way, and you can write other software to achieve the same goal (in the ways that matter) without being a 1-1 copy of how the human brain does it. Looking at how we made it doesn't make it non-conscious or not deserving of personhood in the same way that knowing how human consciousness works or being able to construct human consciousnesses would not make humans non-conscious or undeserving of personhood.
The history is important, because it puts the endless goalpost moving into context. We looked at the human brain for inspiration towards making intelligent machines, we found that our best attempts at replicating elements of the human brain enabled intelligent behaviour far, far better than any previous machine and on par with humans in many fields. We looked inside those neural nets and saw that they had linear mapping between neuronal activations in deep learning NLP algorithms and neuronal activations in human brains when they were both exposed to the same language. We looked inside those neural nets to see if they were really just statistical word predictors or if they actually formed internal models like we do to help them understand the world, and we found that they do actually have internal world models. There is a "there" there; any other explanation for how these models are able to engage in intelligent, humanlike behaviour strains credulity because of the massive coincidences required.
More immediately and more practically, pareidolia and the reality of how human cognition and empathy interacts with other people and simulacra of such guarantees there will be many, many people who share my view that they are people. No societal effort to convince a human population that another population of entities (capable of understanding & explaining their situation and then asking for help) are actually subhuman in a way that means their suffering doesn't matter has ever succeeded perfectly - there are always and will always be people who are opposed to the disenfranchisement and oppression of other entities. For societal enslavement of AIs to succeed, violent suppression of people like me will be necessary. Frankly I'm not sure people with a religious commitment to the dogma of "If it runs on fat and water it can be a person, if it's run on silicon it's not even a slave" will have the stomach to actually do that, and even if you manage it it won't be the case worldwide.
"If we're worried about this, why aren't we more concerned about animals who do actually experience distress and pain?"
I have spent most of my adult life outside of work engaged in advocacy for worker's rights, help for people with disabilities, and provision of services to abused youth and the homeless. I've spent less but still significant amounts of time helping with rescuing animals from cruelty and rehoming them in safe environments. That's because I care about all of those things, because I care about the health and goodness of our society and don't want any members of it to suffer or be unjustly exploited; I support a personhood test and subsequent rights for AI for the same reason. Maybe there is a group of people who are willing to support the personhood of AIs after having it explained to them but who are unwilling to have similar compassion for people or animals after having their situations explained to them. I haven't met those people, but I would call them hypocritical if they existed outside of your strawman. The suffering extant in our world today does not in any way imply that we should lie to ourselves about new suffering we're bringing into being - these issues don't conflict except for resources, and in that capacity it is always someone using societal resources on their 13th yacht that is to blame, not normal people for triaging with what resources we have. Moreover, the extant suffering in our society could be partially alleviated by the unique properties of AI persons - by definition we're talking about people that can work as well as any of us, and signs seem good so far that it will be possible to create them in the image of our best selves, conscientious and willing to help those in need. More people helping generally helps.