With all these sorts of things I can’t stop thinking about those little balls with bells in them for cats to play with. Like it’s not alive, the cat probably doesn’t think it’s alive either insofar as the cat has any kind of model for “things that are alive” and “things that are not” whatever that model may be, but it’s a simulacrum of prey, a funny little thing that moves and makes fun noises when it moves and it just makes the cat’s instincts go wild wanting to chase it and hit it and carry it around.

And I mean there are a lot more explicit “this is a psycho-sexual jingly ball for human sadists” toys out there, but the whole AI waifu pet genre is so extremely human-jingly-ball coded, just these simulacra of hybrid prey and companions for their target demographics, an outlet for both sadism and loneliness.