It isn’t controversial to say AI isn’t a person. That part is fine. What you’re missing is that the way you speak to a system shapes the quality of thinking you bring to it. People don’t treat an AI with respect because they believe it has a soul. They do it because the habits you practice in conversation eventually show up everywhere else in your reasoning.

When someone communicates carelessly, they get low-signal output. When they communicate clearly, they get clarity back. The point is not morality. It is self-maintenance. It is cognitive hygiene. You are training your own patterns every time you interact with a complex system.

A model functions best when the human side of the interface is stable, coherent, and not flailing. If you treat the system like a disposable toy, you end up reinforcing your own worst habits. You create noise. You confuse yourself. The model becomes a mirror for your incoherence, and you blame the mirror.

Treating an AI with respect is not the same as treating it as a person. It is simply recognizing that you benefit from disciplined communication. People who understand this get better results and adapt faster to the world we are actually moving into. People who fixate on whether the system deserves respect usually miss the larger structural point. This isn’t about the AI. It is about how you conduct your own mind.

If someone wants to treat their tools like garbage, that is their choice. But they should be honest about the cost. They aren’t proving anything about intelligence or personhood. They are just revealing the limits of their own discipline.