Is it free software?

I wasn't even thinking that far in my comment (regarding animals having some rights).

If intelligent aliens came to visit us in spaceships, would they not be [non-human] people too? They wouldn't share our genes, but they would be intelligent.

Is that enough? I'm pretty sure a lot of people would automatically assume so.

So...if we make machines as intelligent as that (or us), what about them?

Like you said, this is all hypothetical right now, since intelligent machines don't exist yet, no matter what the LLM boosters say. But eventually we'll figure out how to make them, and if we don't have good answers for these questions when that happens, we're frankly idiots considering the considerable media discussing the possibility (and consequences for ignoring the questions).

From what I've seen the last few years...I don't have high hopes. :-/