I attribute a subjective experience to the journalist on the basis of similarity with me. No need for "the output", I would do that with someone who can't talk or write too. From where my own subjective experience come from and how can I prove it to you is irrelevant to the fact that I have it so I'm fine with being the bootstrap of the circular reasoning to give it to the rest of humanity.

With that said I maintain that the output proves nothing, it's not because it's all we have that it's not useless. Also it's the only thing we have only with the hypothesis that consciousness is a side-effect of computation (the point of the article), but it could anything, like a property of matter, or electromagnetic fields, etc...