>a pile of code instructing machinery to act in a certain way
OK, but I have a genetic code which instructs me to act in a certain way, and a bunch of biological machinery to do the job. So do you feel the substrate is the key factor? Wetware vs electronics?
What if you try to build an exact electromechanical replica of me, with a chip that's got an LLM fine-tuned on my writing/behavior/etc. so as to replicate me as closely as possible?
Sure, as a legal convention it might make sense to hold the builder of the resulting robot liable if it commits a crime.
But that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in the deeper implications of words like "agency" or "free will". You're repeating those terms very forcefully as if they have some sort of key relevance, but good philosophy requires more than just stating your position forcefully and insulting people who disagree. If you're trying to enforce your intuitions rather than examine them, that's theology not philosophy.
This isn’t a philosophical issue. It’s a legal issue. You’re trying to steer the discussion into the realm of the conceptual when it was always about the culpability of the company behind the AI that engaged in illegal behaviour.
Worse, you’re doing it in such a transparent, amateurish, and unserious manner that it’s difficult to find any relevance in what you have to say. Philosophy seeks meaning, your arguments lack it.