Comment by rcxdude

Purely descriptively, this seems to be how a lot of people use the word in this context. 'Intelligent' gets the same treatment in a lot of cases as well.

(OK, more charitably, these concepts are often murkily defined, but people react emotionally to any concrete definition because they have in their mind that something being conscious and intelligent implies that it requires moral consideration, and morality is complicated, murky, and generally emotionally driven in a way that most concrete definitions struggle to adequately describe)