Just adding Dr Alan Turing's comment here, from this original 1950 paper on AI:

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>…should we not believe that He [source, the universe, life] has freedom to confer a soul on an elephant if He sees fit? We might expect that He would only exercise this power in conjunction with a mutation which provided the elephant with an appropriately improved brain to minister to the needs of this sort.
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>An argument of exactly similar form may be made for the case of machines. It may seem different because it is more difficult to “swallow.” But this really only means that we think it would be less likely that He would consider the circumstances suitable for conferring a soul. The circumstances in question are discussed in the rest of this paper. In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.

Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433–460. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433