While I appreciate the philosophical take, it seems that you’ve misunderstood what AI is.
Have you ever been typing out a text and seen that your phone is recommending a list of words for you to select next? This is an example of AI. Your phone has been programmed with a list of words and a set probablility of one word following the other. For instance, if you type “I”, it will almost certainly suggest “am”, because there’s a high probabibility of that being correct. More advanced AI, like ChatGPT work the same way, only on a grander scale. It has no idea what its words mean, but through clever programming can create the illusion that it does.
Data on the other hand is explicitly stated to have a human-like consciousness. His posotronic brain is no different than a human brain, besides being artificial.
Naturally, this brings up the age old philosophical debate on “what actually is consciousness”. The simple answer is that we still don’t have a good explanation. You could argue that humans also follow an algorithm, just far more advanced, but I would argue that this doesn’t satisfactorily explain how humans are able to extrapolate their own ideas from abstract concepts.