If your audience can believe it is a person soley because it is person-shaped, or has a face: you are a coward.
The willingness to believe something in fiction is so fascinating, because if you had a story where it was just accepted that there are sentient robots that looked like the one above, the audience would go along with it.
But if the story was about "what is sentience" I doubt the average audience member would be willing to accept it. So you either have to make it look like us, or fear losing most your audience. And if you take it one step further and extrapolate sentience, as used in fiction, as a reflection of "what does it mean to be a person" then "being human-shaped" becomes an essential component of personhood whether that was the intention or not.
I think the exception to this might be horror, in which case one of the components that makes it scary is that it doesn't look like us
