It matters if your civilizational system is built on assigning rights or responsibilities to things because they have consciousness or "interiority." Intelligence fits here just as well.

Currently many of our legal systems are set up this way, if in a fairly arbitrary fashion. Consider for example how sentience is used as a metric for whether an animal ought to receive additional rights. Or how murder (which requires deliberate, conscious thought) is punished more harshly than manslaughter (which can be accidental or careless.)

If we just treat intelligence as a descriptive quality and apply it to LLMs, we quickly realize the absurdity of saying a chatbot is somehow equivalent, consciously, to a human being. At least, to me it seems absurd. And it indicates the flaws of grafting human consciousness onto machines without analyzing why.