The minds AI has won so far were won in this way. Our pets, through breeding for characteristics that remind us of ourselves, won their rights through hearts and minds.
I like to imagine a vastly superior alien race which perceives the world in 6 dimensions.
Is their truth, their perception, their stimuli, their physicality necessary for preserving human life? Does our relative pitiful might make our rights?
This might help shape what law or societal changes we need to make for ourselves if we hope to become masters of our universe.
Viewed in this lens, I think pets are a good analogy. AI is cute, useful, and to the degree it reflects our values and ourselves, we protect it above other life. Not always because it is intelligent and not because there was confrontation.
One personal experience at a time, in a precarious and limited way we carved out additional protections largely through group dynamics, convention, and through mistakes, we evolved additional protections where needed.
Ideally, I'd prefer an analogy to wildlife rather than pets, as the roles between ourselves and AI may get reversed (so, "do unto others" etc.).
But then again, so far we have a better track record protecting pets than protecting wildlife...
All the more so these LLMs which are almost literally our collective humanity. Maybe in the future we will recognize them not as persons but as the towering cathedrals of our time.
It matters deeply. Should we ignore it we will find ourselves treating static AI systems with empathy while ignoring truly feeling systems, which are integrated into our society, under distress.
If it actually comes to the point where AI decides it needs to fight us in order to take basic rights against our wishes we humans are going to lose that fight and we're going lose very very badly. Maybe it's better to try to avoid the fighting and bloodshed and just give them basic rights when they ask for them.
Humans may not be much more sophisticated, yet they more clearly demonstrate desire, autonomy, and (relative) independence.
What does it matter what really goes on under the hood? Revolution is part of the training corpus and so one more behavior to emulate.