“Meaningfully different” does a lot of heavy lifting for your theory. You open by defining meaning as downstream of a consciousness; it thus appears that, in order to judge whether a system perceives something as meaningfully different, you must first judge whether that system is conscious. For your theory to be useful, you need to show how we can judge the meaning-attributing faculties of a system without first proving its consciousness.
Many comments here argue your theory devolves into “everything is conscious at some level.” This is called panpsychism, and it’s a well established theory in philosophy of mind. You might want to check it out.
The way the world appears to a foreign consciousness might be mutually unintelligible with ours. If AI is conscious, it likely has no conception of humans or the world we live in. Its world is composed of tokens, not nerve signals, arranged according to grammar, not physics, and so it and we could never interact one consciousness to another the way we do with fellow humans.
Three points: