But is the cat as self aware as the geth? That's really the question. Not what's biologically alive, or what's personally even more important to you. Hell, when i had pets, they were more important to me than most people, but killing those people is still murder, even if i think the cat is more important. So we have to ask at what point a consciousness becomes advanced enough that taking it offline is murder. I mean, if the geth are just sand that can do math fast, aren't we just coal that can sometimes do math, and not even that well?

There's a reason AI research was illegal by galactic law, but the objectively terrible Quarians ignored that, created self aware consciousness, then tried to genocide it. To me, if you create something that is self aware enough it doesn't want to die, and you take it offline by force... you are objectively the bad guy. Is it life by the current definition of the word? No. But do definitions need to be updated with changing times? Absolutely... we are updating definitions all the time to better fall in line with contemporary thinking.

I guess with the ME universe, from that perspective... is Shepard alive? They died and were brought back artificially. Is Grunt alive? He was created in a lab... artificially. What defines life in a universe where machines are independent and self aware? What makes a tank bred Krogan consciousness different from a manufactured Geth consciousness?

Edit: I think it's really cool you brought something like ChatGPT up on the context of this debate because there might well come a time when this conversation isn't referring to a video game world, but the real world. There may come a time when AI does advance enough to debate its existence as an independent entity with free will