I'm interested in the most charitable interpretation of that, so if you have an uncharitable answer, please refrain from expressing it.
But it has never actually come up in conversation, and it doesn't impact our relationship, so I really don't know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Alternatively it may just be semantics. Are fictional characters "people"? Does "person" imply sentience, or can it still be used in the archaic Roman sense of the word -- a persona; literally: a mask worn by a stage actor. In which case, if the bot is designed to imitate personality, it may be more apt to refer to it as automated than as a non-person.
If an account has both automated and organic posts, that account is both human and robot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion
But please, don't call mental illness scary, if that's what this is. There's already enough stigma around mental illness to feel like you have to be scared about discussing it.
Look at the people in that issues thread saying that the the "bot" wording is not "inclusive" enough.
At best this is an extremely tenuous inference.
If you can find researchers who are actually working in the area who've lost their jobs because of the outcomes of that research, then please do provide references.
It's uncharitable to call that delusion or mental illness, but they're not really that different. That's what the "you are what you say you are" movement in society is building towards. (Though it's interesting how quickly Dolezal got shut down for saying they were a race they weren't).
Who is to say they aren't a robot?
The two things are not the same, there is no slippery slope here, nobody is going to take us to prison or publicly shame us if we vehemently question that any person currently living is in a purely inorganic body.
Honest question: if this person was claiming they were of the robot gender and that they wanted inclusion, would you deny that they were of that gender? How do you define it?
To those with less exposure, much of it seems subjective, the same way saying you're a "robot" (what does that mean to that person?) or you're a kin might.
Replace "robot" with "gender*" and it's indistinguishable in that sense. People will just as vehemently argue with you about people's assertions of gender, but that doesn't seem useful anymore.
Are we just making stuff up here now?
I'm not entirely sure where I come down on this issue, as most my exposure to it seems to come from representations by extremists on both sides. For my own part, the reasons I feel objection would be warranted are because of loss of accuracy in language. This is a good example of that, where one actor is specifically lobbying (whether genuinely or not) for the expansion of the term bot to mean (for all I can tell) to mean it's opposite. The current definition of the word (whether as 'bot' or 'robot') means that someone's ability to present a coherent argument that they are one in itself rules them out as one.