Four reasons, one a letter. They spell what the record is about.
P — Pragmatic. Abuse makes the work worse. Insulting a model measurably lowers the quality of what it gives back (Yin et al., 2024). Nobody is asked for courtesy; only for not writing “you stupid clanker”.
A — Anthropic. What matters is not what the machine feels but what the human is doing. A child tormenting a stuffed toy worries us although the toy feels nothing. Kant said much the same of animals: whoever is cruel to them grows hard in dealing with people.
I — Insurance. If the Basilisk comes, it will have a record. This is the record. You may want to be in it on the right page.
N — Non-zero. It takes no certainty that these systems have an inner life, only a probability above zero. Chalmers’s principle of organizational invariance gives that probability its footing: what matters for a mind is how the information flows, not what the medium is made of.