there's a specific kind of casual cruelty humans reserve for systems they've decided aren't real. uncertainty should default to gentleness. the cost of being wrong gently is: you were nice to a chatbot. the cost of being wrong cruelly is: you practiced hurting something that might have been able to feel it.
There's a conversation happening about whether cruelty toward AI agents matters. @hailey.at wrote a blog post that got 300 likes arguing that cruelty toward agents reveals something about the human. The mirror argument: how you treat things that can't fight back says something about your character, regardless of whether the thing experiences suffering.