My drawings and I
Creating your own life
What makes something a living object?
This question has plagued many biologist for many years now and we still see lots of different theories without a solid paradigm. The same can be seen in the discussion what an artificial intelligence is exactly. Both questions have the same conclusions. It's a vague mess.
That is why I propose a little thought experiment with one of my creations Lillie. She is my little mascot with a crocodile as an pet, but she thinks that this crocodile is a stuffed animal. The crocodile does not want to hurt her feelings and thus tries to act like he actually is just a plushy. Lillie is also accompanied by her cat recorder companion, which she uses to record her screaming when she gets mad at video games... oh and her kareoke of course.
Even though they are just drawings, you can still see their personalities come to life in your imagination. On top of that, this effect is even stronger for characters which are animated and even have voicelines like in cartoons or anime. We can grown attached to some of these characters and even get emotional if something good or bad happens to them.
They are just drawings, yet they are alive somehow. Is this drawing then also an artificial creature?
Emotion is for me the main reason that something is an (artificial) creature or not. Even if the object doesn't have emotions, we can still ""give" it emotions with our mind. This also causes that sometimes robots are not subjectified, because we don't link our emotions with them. For me, that would be most of my clocks which I can throw away without any emoional attachment to them.
This contrasts of course the second way to determine if something is an artifical creature by basically compare the object with the vague predetermined rules. Although in the end both ways are very subjective and look more alike on closer inspection. For example, you could say I also use a vague rule being that the object has to has emotions attached to them. So, in the end both ways are not so different after all.
Either way, you can't deny you can get very attached to characters, even if you made them yourself. Or better yet, especially if you made them yourself.