You’re not trying to remove a moral status but deny it in the first place. That’s different but the end result of it still seems the same.

We used to justify the mistreatment of animals with the assumption that they had no subjective experience either. I’m not suggesting AI does but I’m also not claiming it with absolute certainty does not either, and the more we develop those systems, the more likely it seems to me that at some point there’s a good chance that they will.

The psychological drive behind the urge to call something with a derogatory term is the same in both cases.

That is how slurs tend to be used: as a tool to dehumanize something we wish to grant no moral value to.

My hot take is that anyone intentionally being mean to an AI is not a psychologically stable person and similar behaviour can most likely be observed in other parts of their life as well.

This is why “Westworld” would never work. Whether the robots there actually feel anything is beside the point. We’d simply view the people who go there to take pleasure in abusing these human-like machines as the sadistic psychopaths that they are.