Yep, that's an excellent point -- humans in general, but particularly and historically men in power, have long argued that other beings (animals, women, Blacks, indigenous people, and more) weren't intelligent or civilized and thus could be run roughshod over.

One of the things that's additionally ethically queasy about today's AI is that even if chatbot-style word-prediction AI isn't alive or conscious in any meaningful sense of the word, the way we humans behave towards devices that mimic lifelikeness can have an effect on us ... and on how we treat other beings. Or to put it another way, being surrounded by machines that aren't sentient but are programmed to mimic human speech carries some subtle ethical and moral risks. If we're routinely callous or dismissive towards machines that affect human-like behavior, it might transfer over to how we deal with actual humans and living creatures ...