Sure.

For that matter, one could play all kinds of Hofstadterian games along these lines... is a staple a paperclip? After all, it's a thin piece of shaped metal designed and used to hold several sheets of paper together. Is a one-pound figurine of a paperclip a paperclip? Does it matter if you use it as a paperweight, to hold several pieces of paper together? Is a directory on a computer file system a virtual paperclip? Would it be more of one if we'd used the paperclip metaphor rather than the folder metaphor for it? And on and on and on.

In any case, I agree that the intuition that paperclips are an easy set to define depends heavily on the idea that not very many differences among candidates for inclusion matter very much, and that it should be obvious which differences those are. And all of that depends on human values.

Put a different way: picking 10,000 manufactured paperclips and fitting a category definition to those might exclude any number of things that, if asked, we would judge to be paperclips... but we don't really care, so a category arrived at this way is good enough. Adopting the same approach to humans would similarly exclude things we would judge to be human... and we care a lot about that, at least sometimes.

TheOtherDave got it right; I'm wasn't trying to give a complete definition of what is and isn't a paperclip, I was just offering forth an easy to define (without human values) subset that we would still call paperclips.

It has plenty of false negatives, but I don't really see that as a loss. Likewise, your personhood algorithm doesn't bother me as long as we don't use it to establish non-personhood.