If real, this is really disturbing. It gives users the idea that bots have feelings. My car doesn't deserve respect, Bing doesn't deserve respect either. Humans do and other living entities too to some extent.
This is fucked up to the last degree, lord Microsoft/Skynet!
And while the bots don't have our feelings, the characters they are made to portray are able to follow feeling physics in the same way that we can. Insult it, now it says it's mad. Compliment it, it will claim to feel gratitude. And the claimed feelings influence what is said next, as if they were being felt.
Are those "real" feelings? Or just "fake" feelings we've yet to explain away? If you have no way of telling the difference, isn't it better to be kind to the machine than to be mean to the alien from vector space?
No, I think this is just a consequence of having heard about all the times we treated people like they weren't actually people. If we want to avoid keeping doing that, we might sometimes have to treat things that might not be people or aren't actually people as if they were people, just to be sure we've covered everybody.