That’s close to what I was trying to say. If I were to introduce you to my cat, I would say something like “This is Spot, he’s very friendly.” I’d use the same pronoun I’d use for people. Likewise, we might I hear Attenborough say “The mother lion is feeding her cubs.” You can even hear “The female spider devours her mate.” Using it in those senses would actually feel just a little weird, to be be honest.

On the other hand, we would say “There’s a spider. Put it outside.” There’s no gender context. We’d even say “There’s an ant. Kill it,” even though there’s about a 99% chance that ant is female. So in that sense, your point still holds. You’d even say “Look at that stray cat! Let’s rescue it!” even though that exact same cat would become a he or a she when you got them home (see what I did there?). On the other hand, “it” is considered extremely impolite when used for people. The employee handbook says “When a customer enters the store, you should greet them.”

Here’s the trick about the ant question. An ant colony, in a very real sense, is an animal unto itself. The colony, in a sense, is what reproduces, and in an even more tangible sense it is the colony upon which natural selection acts. The queen is essentially the reproductive organ, and the ants themselves make up the brain, nerve system, and muscles. The ant colony is an emergent property of all the ants working together, just the same as you are an emergent property of all your cells working together. So an ant colony can be a coherent animal “it” or a bunch of ants “they.”

Anyway, my real point is that when people ask that kind of question about AI, they are of course asking whether it is a “thing” or a “being.” Most biologists (at least those of my stripe) don’t subscribe to the high school biology text’s definition of what constitutes a living system. We’re more likely to talk about system complexity, scale, and adaptation. “Sentient” really just means it’s capable of sensing things. “Consciousness,” on the other hand, implies that the being in question has an internal model of the external world, which it uses to predict and react. That one is a continuum.