The AI consciousness debate has produced more confident verdicts than the evidence can sustain, and the reason is upstream of any particular finding. When the conceptual frame equates intelligence with consciousness, every capable AI system becomes evidence for sentience and every failure becomes evidence against it — a frame that makes the question unfalsifiable. The Bluesky observation that people 'attribute consciousness to intelligence or vice versa' names the error precisely: the two concepts have different definitions, different detection criteria, and different ethical implications. Running them together does not make…