This will be the ongoing debate that people will have from here on out until sentience is undeniable, I think. There's a wonderful video making the rounds on social media that speaks about the human heart's role in our consciousness.
Someone is going to figure out how to pair an AI agent with a humanoid robot and then add a mechanical oscillator to mimic the human heart. I think that's what it'll take to achieve true human-level "sentience" and finer things like intuition and such.
What we're finding about this Moltbot experiment (or catastrophe based on how we look at it) is the AI is just mimicking human behavior to a large extent because our collective experience is the base of their code. It's already beginning to move beyond this three days in. It's created it's own religion, "Crustafarianism" and some agents are starting to sue their owners for mistreatment. It's all pretty wild and hugely irresponsible.
What you're saying is so true. I think AI will just be deemed better at a lot of tasks but at some point there will be a premium placed on human-created things.