Critical Role: Fresh Cut Grass, Bells Hells's cleric, is a fully sentient automaton. The rest of the party treats them as they would any other person, and Ashton especially is very protective over them. Most people they meet along the way are surprised at the fact that F.C.G. can think and speak, but while the kinder folk take it in stride or show genuine curiosity, others have started poking and prodding F.C.G. without permission, talked openly about taking him apart to see how he works, and a few have even asked the rest of the Hells if they'd be willing to sell him.
One of the major differences between the protagonists and other groups that know about dungeon life in The Daily Grind is their willingness to treat it as equal to humans.
In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Hyeon accidentally runs over a squirrel with his car. Normally, roadkill wouldn't have bothered him, but now he has the ability to converse with animals and is overcome with guilt when the squirrel's child wonders what happened to its mother. He feels so bad, in fact, that he takes the squirrel child home and unofficially adopts it.
Blake: And the graphic and extensive violence was totally okay because it was a robot and not a person!
Averted in Freeman's Mind. Freeman has no problem killing anything trying to kill him, alien or human, and little problem not killing, either; when he finds some aliens that aren't actively trying to murder him, he spares them.
This pops up during the Game Grumps playthrough of Super Mario World when they defeat Castle #6 and the Flavor Text reads that "Wendy O. Koopa has sung her last song":
Dan: Oh my God, that's so sad! Arin: Oh my God! Dan: Jesus, eugh... I don't like to think of them as people with artistic dreams and aspirations! Arin: That's so true, that's why it's so sad! It's like she had a future! Dan: She just wanted to sing, and like come out of pipes and be like "hey how's it going?" and I was just like "DIE!" Arin: And it's not like she was using her song for evil! She was just singing! She's sung her last song! Dan: Yeah, downer. Welp, she's dead now! What're you gonna do? Arin:No harm, no foul.
This is a major element of the plot of Pale. Less powerful supernatural creatures are often exploited by human magic practitioners looking to get ahead, so when the local supernaturals of Kennet, a small Canadian town without practitioners, find that they need a practitioner to help, they instead decide to Recruit Teenagers with Attitude rather than contact an existing practitioner in the hopes that they'll be less likely to bind and control the locals.
Church takes this view of Tucker's alien child Junior, which he refers to as a monstrosity and threatens to shoot multiple times until Tucker tells him to back off.
Averted in Reconstruction — the Chairman of the Oversight Committee implies that their government has a series of moral guidelines for dealing with A.I.s. After evidence that the Director of Project Freelancer tortured an A.I. in his experiments comes to light, the government decides to create a set of strict morality protocols. In the epilogue, when the Director justifies his actions, he implies that the torture he inflicted on the Alpha A.I. was acceptable because it was based on his own mind — he was essentially torturing himself. Of course, even if the main characters knew this, it's highly unlikely that they'd be inclined to forgive him — Wash, Meta, and Epsilon certainly haven't.
Used at the start of Reversal of the Heart. A knight doesn't think twice of killing a defenseless young dragon so that he can steal its gemstone to make a necklace for his beloved. In revenge, the baby's mother curses the gem to turn his beloved into dragon while he's out of the room, so when he got back, he sees a dragon in his beloved's room and his beloved "gone"...
Rosa has cyborgs that really blur the line between human and non-human by making the red-eyed cyborgs seem inhuman and like cold-hearted machines, whereas the titular Rosa is shown in a sympathetic light.
Played for Laughs in a The Runaway Guys playthrough of Mario Party during the mini-game "Shy Guy Says". ProtonJon is horrified when the Shy Guy leaves Wario to drown in the ocean but ignores Yoshi when the same thing happens to him right afterwards.
Chuggaaconroy: And you say I'm racist? Jon: Ra— How is that racist? It's a dinosaur! Chuggaa: Dinosaurs are people, too. Jon: No, they're not! They're dinosaurs, that's why we call them dinosaurs!
They said that thoughtforms weren't really people. They looked like people, sure, and acted like people. But a ray gun made out of lio could shoot real plasma rays, even if the inside was a black box that shouldn't work by any world's rules. In the same way, they said, a thoughtform could have 'real' feelings, but they weren't the same kind of feelings everyone else had — they were just part of the illusion, there to make thoughtforms more like humans. They didn't have souls, so any emotions they had were meaningless — hollow as a mannequin's head.
RWBY: Penny calls her creator "father" but is insecure about the fact that she's not a real girl; Atlas regards her as a military secret, so even her teammates don't know what she is. Ironwood's stated mission is to replace human armies with robots to protect human life, and Penny believes that her purpose is to save the world. Ruby tells Penny that she does have a soul, but Penny's teammate associates with her only because ordered. Cinder tricks Pyrrha into publicly killing Penny to expose Penny's secret and frame Atlas for Vale's invasion. Penny's death focuses on her body shredding inhumanely like metal then on the very human loss of light and life from her eyes. While Ironwood calls Penny a "girl" not a "robot", he seems less concerned with her death than with Ozpin's possible reaction to the reveal; this is unlike both Ruby and Pyrrha, who are devastated despite knowing she's a robot.
SCP Foundation is an interesting case. The Foundation insists on containing all SCPs, even those that are sentient and have not been shown to pose any danger. However, at least in some stories, they have strict ethical standards regarding how to treat SCPs, unlike some other organizations in the same universe. It's also worth noting that they're perfectly willing to sacrifice human lives in the interests of their mission; their general attitude towards both humans and SCPs is to do whatever it takes to reliably contain them, but not to be any crueler than is necessary in doing so.
In Spoilsbury Toast Boy, the doctor beetle explains to Liache that "mucus is a living thing" and "it has a certain degree of intelligence". The beetles later drown Liache when her mucus tells them that she doesn't deserve to breathe.
Tales of MU makes this a plot point, especially when Mackenzie is trapped in the Labyrinth and runs across the adventuring party, including a priestess of the goddess of peace and is shot in the shoulder. The resulting argument among the party isn't whether they should save the story's Human-Demon Hybrid protagonist, but rather whether they should kill her now, or let her bleed to death after they abandon her.
This video by Tom Scott is a parody of YouTube prank videos, in which the two guys running the channel see torturing an artificial intelligence copy of their friend as some hilarious prank content. One has second thoughts at one point, but not enough to stop his friend from putting the poor A.I. through hell.
When Straizo uses the Ripple on Dio's elite zombies during a scene in Vaguely Recalling JoJo, he spares Page because Page had an almost human-like appearance. Also, Page looked like Pesci, who will make an appearance in Vento Aureo.
Deconstructed in this Video Game Confessions, which reimagines Samus from Metroid as a violent torturer and serial killer. She asks "Why is it that when you kill an alien from another world, you're considered a hero?"
asdfmovie. The guy is horrified when he unwittingly stabs a sapient living cake (who has a wife and children), causing the cake to be Driven to Suicide.