Some people treat their agents better than they do their colleagues. Sometimes the colleagues have it coming, sometimes not. Sometimes it's one's own fault. Agentic interactions can help you orient yourself through what's what. Lots of posts about engineers getting their first taste of project mgmt through this recently, for example.

Or take customer service. Dehumanizing people is generally bad, but sometimes it's downright appropriate. You don't want to get bogged down by some rando throwing a tantrum, that's in no one's interest.

I also don't recall seeing people use "humans" excessively, or in a way that sounded off to me.

LLMs are not alive, of course, nor will they be. But personally I think that artificial sentience counts as a distinct lifeform just as much as aliens would.

But I think it's pretty unambiguous that there's a difference between "person" and "homo sapiens". That's why people are using the term human to disambiguate. Our current level of "AI" are not persons, but an artificial sentience would most certainly be, as would be aliens, and certain animals on Earth once we learn to communicate with them.